Tag: www.CoolWX.com

Problems With This Website

If you’ve tried to get to this website over the past few days, you’ve probably experienced some difficulty. I was going to blame my hosting company, but the fault lies elsewhere.

On the right side of each page of geofffox.com is a plethora of weather data. I can’t imagine anyone really uses it, and I should remove it to reduce clutter and load times. Tonight, it bit me on the ass.

A line of php code plucks a list of extreme weather across the country and places it in that column. The list is actually produced on my friend Bob’s site, www.coolwx.com. His site, or maybe just this file, is unavailable, so my site sat and patiently waited for this little file… and waited… and waited some more.

This evening, using the free WiFi at Las Vegas McCarren Airport, I edited the code on my site to remove the link. Everything’s OK now.

The Coolest Weather

My friend Bob, down in Florida, might be the smartest guy I know. Certainly, as far as math is concerned he is.

Bob is a professor at Florida State with a PhD from Penn State. He is also the proprietor of www.CoolWX.com. In meteorological parlance, WX is weather.

Last night Bob hit me on IM to look at an addition to his site: www.CoolWX.com/extreme.

I’m not sure how, but four times an hour he parses every station in the world that’s delivering weather data and then picks out the most extreme of the lot. Where is it hottest or coldest or windiest – right now!

I have been surprised at how few stations actually do report extreme weather, like heavy rain or blizzard conditions. And, I’m sure over time, there will be repeat observations from sites located in inhospitable spots, like Mt. Washington.

The site is still in development, but worth taking a look.