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Frequently Asked Questions
Does Seasonality work with international locations?
Seasonality 1.0 only works with locations within the US or territories of the US such as Puerto Rico and Guam. Seasonality 1.1 and later support international locations, complete with global satellite cloud maps and 5 day forecasts.
Which sites does Seasonality get weather data from?
Seasonality uses several sources to gather weather data. Most of these sources are from different divisions of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Click here for a graphical representation of the data sources referenced here.
The graph data Seasonality uses is translated from METAR weather observations provided by the Aviation Weather Center, a division of the NOAA. Most airports will gather METAR statistics such as temperature and wind speed, and Seasonality keeps a database of the closest METAR weather stations for each location.
The satellite imagery is built by retrieving data from a couple of different sources and processing the data on the Gaucho Software Overlay Server. The global IR satellite image is originally retrieved from the xplanet project's cloud map. Gaucho Software mirrors this imagery for other xplanet users as well. As for the radar imagery, this is retrieved from the National Weather Service (NWS, also a division of the NOAA), which provides a composite radar image for the continental U.S. Seasonality combines this continental U.S. image with images from other locations in Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Guam to display the current radar overlay.
The forecasts are provided by a couple of sources as well. Locations within the continental U.S., Hawaii, Puerto Rico (including surrounding islands), and Guam come from the National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD) project, which is provided by the NWS. Alaska locations and locations in other countries around the globe gather forecast data from the Gaucho Software Forecast Server. The forecast server will download GFS model data from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) twice a day, and process the data into a format Seasonality can use.
Finally, some data like the sun and moon information is generated with code internal to Seasonality. This data is not retrieved from any outside source, so it's availability is immediate and is not dependent on an Internet connection.
What is the red line shown in the sunrise/sunset view?
The red line represents the current local time at the location being monitored. This gives you a rough visual estimate of how much daylight or darkness is left for the current day.
How much space will the past weather data take on my hard drive?
The amount of disk space a certain location will take varies from location to location. Some locations update their weather data every 20 minutes, others only update every hour or two. On average, a single location will take about 1MB on disk for every year of weather data, so if you monitor 5 different locations, your weather database will take 5MB of disk space after a year. Future versions of Seasonality will allow you to specify more specifically how much data you wish to keep and delete data older than a certain date.
Why do the X's marking high/low temperatures in the weather graph sometimes not match up with the curve of the graph?
You will sometimes notice this when using very long graph periods, such as viewing 2 months of data at a time. This occurs when there is more than one weather data point (often many data points) that fall on a single pixel on the graph. If this is the case, Seasonality will average those values and display the average on the graph at that point. When there is a high or low temperature at that point, many times the average will be much higher or lower and will not match up with the X on the graph. As you reduce the amount of time shown horizontally on the graph, the curve should get much closer to the X marking the high or low temperature.
What does the red part of the wind graph represent?
The red part of the wind speed graph appears when there is a gusting wind speed. The bottom graph shows the sustained wind speed, and anything red shows how strong the gust wind speeds were during that time.
What do the colors represent on the satellite map?
The colors show different levels of precipitation over the map area. The radar station will send out signals to the surrounding area, and based on how much of the signal is reflected to the radar station it makes an estimation on the density of the precipitation. Blues show very light precipitation, where reds denote a high level of precipitation. Sometimes at night when there isn't any local precipitation, the radar station will switch to a higher sensitivity, which may show colors on the map in areas where rain or snow isn't actually falling. This will allow the radar to pick up other particles in the atmosphere such as fog or dust.
Why doesn't Seasonality have the weather for my city?
While Seasonality has a database of over 34,000 weather locations around the globe, not all cities are supported. The biggest limitation at the moment is weather forecast availability. Seasonality gathers forecasts for locations outside the U.S. from Environment Canada, and is thus restricted to the locations in which EC provides forecasts. As new forecasts become available, more locations will be added to Seasonality.
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