USVI-On-Line

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's GOES-East weather satellite has had a pretty rough year of it. Back last fall, it had to be taken offline for a month due to a problem with sensor noise, and this May it went offline again due to a micrometeoroid impact. It was returned to service a few weeks ago, but what with all of the troubles, I had taken my Virgin Islands satellite weather site down while the images were unavailable. I apparently broke something when I put the site back online, so all three channel buttons were showing the same image loops, and there were several other issues. I took some time this evening to get everything working again, and made a number of useful edits and changes. I deleted the water vapor channel, which wasn't really all that useful at this high zoom level, and only measures water vapor from 6 - 10 km in altitude, and made the remaining channel descriptions more accurate. I also modified the code to reflect changes in the argument passing that NASA's Earth Science Office had slipped in while I wasn't looking. So the site is all working just fine now, and I hope you'll bookmark it if you haven't already: http://www.vi-satweather.com.

The first launch of the satellite weather site back in 2011 served as my less than seamless introduction to VIOL, which I read from time to time but had never posted on. Having created the weather site, and looking for a way to get the word out, I joined VIOL and posted about it, mentioning in that first post that there did happen to be an ad lurking down there below the free content. Anthony took note of my honesty, but then summarily (and appropriately) deleted the thread! I had thought that maybe the content would give me a free ride. Hey, no worries, a VIOL advertiser sponsorship later, and all was well, although I don't believe that I ever did formally relaunch the site. Hence, this post, and headed as we are into storm season, relevant to boot!

All the best,

Kevin