Analysis Work...

I've been quiet lately. But this doesn't mean I (we) have been lazy. We are still in the throes of major reconstruction and restructuring of our analysis data. In some cases we are merely making some cosmetic changes to the pages that display the data. But in most cases we have been working to generate completely new and improved images. In addition we are attempting to add as many functional and navigational niceties as possible. All the while I'm attempting to keep the back end of our site as tidy as possible. This means URLs to specific products will change because I'm attempting to better organize our directory structure.

With the simple changes and updates; I've pushed those out as quickly as possible. However the biggest challenge has been rethinking organization and navigation. I've been quite pleased with navigational concepts I've brought to other products on our site. But bringing those changes to our analysis products in a successful and intuitive manner has proved itself to be a tad complicated.

Nevertheless in the past couple weeks I've had a couple break-throughs that have brought us much closer to completion. The best place to show off these new features is with our new Upper Air data page. The following *should be* the final product and new location for this page.


What's new?

• Raw data; both in PDF and GIF format, as well as contoured images are all accessible from this page
• All images are now generated by GEMPAK rather than WXP
• New menu system with improved functionality as seen with other product pages across our site
• BOTH Time AND Height rollover features are available for Raw Data and Jet Stream Analysis. Temporal rollover will remember what Height you are on, Height rollover will remember what Time you are on.

A feature I'm still debating whether or not to add to this page is the ability to load Sounding(RAOB) data by clicking sites on the Raw Data plots. This is a feature we used to have long ago and *might* be possible to implement again. Obviously this data is now displayed in a much more complicated manner, so it's not entirely obvious if reinstating such a feature is possible.

Moving on; Surface data is next in line to be worked on. I haven't really approached it yet, but off the top of my head I imagine it to be an easier mountain to scale than this new Upper Air page.

With the flurry of improvements I was able to fire off this summer, I feel this current task with our Analysis products has moved slowly. If you have been anticipating these improvements and feel that they've been delayed in anyway... I assure you I am just as anxious to deliver, but we want to get everything right first.

Until next time...