Southern Ontario Weather Website

[davefootball123]

As some of you may or may not know, I have been developing a website that focuses on enabling the user to obtain weather warnings, forecast, and radar data with ease for much of Southern Ontario. It has taken a lot of time to develop but I finally have something that I am fairly happy with. The website is mainly latitude/longitude based. All Environment Canada forecast products are retrieved from a database that I created that converts their sub-region based forecasts into latitude longitude based "point and click" forecasts. The warnings are also latitude longitude based on the Environment Canada sub-region and they are plotted on a custom colour coded warning map that I created and that is exclusive to this website. Other features include location detection to get your nearest forecast location and radar that incorporates both EC and NWS radar using the Wunderground radar API. Lots of other smaller features including quite a selection of weather maps. I am currently working on a radar feature that detects your location and zooms onto your location without you having to specify the area you would like to view. One other feature that is currently in development ( was beta tested during the September 11th storm event) is a text messaging service that sends Environment Canada warning data to your cell phones the moment a warning is issued. For more information on this, visit the WeatherCentre Alerts section of the website. My main goal with this website was to have a clean design that delivers required weather information to the user with little effort. The domain is www.sowx.ca. More features are in development, and if you have any recommendations or requests feel free to post them below.

Dave,

[Eabie]

I know this isn't the point of your website, but I will say that there does seem to be a gap here in Southern Ontario for frequent, detailed, non-technical weather forecasting and analysis in blog form... though I admit that perhaps they exist and I just haven't been able to find them yet. There's plenty of Twitter feeds and some Facebook pages (Hamilton Weather perhaps being the best Facebook page I can find, and the closest to what I'm looking for). It's something that surprises me a bit - the weather is every bit as interesting here, maybe more so, as it is in the prairies, and there's considerably more people, yet good-quality and regularly updated blogs are hard to find. The Severe Weather Centre blog (http://torontowxcenter.blogspot.ca) is probably good for some who really know their meteorology, but it's far too technical, jargon-heavy, and unclear for regular readers like myself. It just doesn't make for interesting or engaging reading.

I'm interested in finding an Ontario weather blog similar to the following (all based in Winnipeg):

http://aweathermoment.com/
http://robsobsblog.blogspot.ca/
http://jjwinnipegweather.blogspot.ca/

[davefootball123]

Thanks for the input Eabie, nice to have you back posting on the forum. You do bring up a very good point, there seems to be a lack of non-technical weather blogs in Ontario, which is quite odd considering our population and variability of weather here. I will take a look into it, might be a fun project to work on. I would do it in such a way that it is integrated seamlessly with the website, and also in a way that one can interact with the posts on the blog.

[Eabie]

Thank you! It's nice to be back.

If you're interested, those three blogs all have their own strengths which might be worth thinking about too. Rob's is the easiest to search through because of the way posts are archived by month and year, which is especially helpful 'cause his is also the oldest, going back to 2006 - making it a useful historical resource as well. A Weather Moment is probably the most frequently updated and might be the best at using some technical terminology and analysis, particularly during severe weather season, but in a way that laypeople can understand relatively easily - the focus is still always on the weather that people will be experiencing, rather than the meteorology itself, if you know what I mean. (Here's a typical post from back in June, for example: http://aweathermoment.com/post/53352...thern-manitoba . Be sure to scroll down the comments section as well, which they use for updates - both Scott and Brad are contributors to the site). JJ's blog is quite useful for certain statistics and I enjoy his yearly top 10s and monthly summaries, in addition to his general weather posting.