Watching the Mountain We Call Washington

2014-12-09 16:48:34.000 – Roger Pushor, Weather Observer/IT Specialist

It seems like it’s been just about forever since I last wrote an Observer Comment and that’s because I’ve been heads down working on getting content up to this new website.

The summit of Mount Washington is an ever changing place so our website must be able to keep up with the current conditions. After reviewing all of the existing programs that updated the old website it was decided the best approach would be to consolidate and re-write all of the software that uploaded data and webcam images. We decided to update the meteorological data every minute and the webcam images every five minutes. In the event that we have been unable to update data within the past two hours a notice is put up stating the information isn’t available. The 36-hour higher summits forecast has also been increased to 48 hours.

Mike Dorfman, Mike Kyle, and I reprogrammed all the software that uploads data to the new website. Most of the website was designed and built by SilverTech, however the new Current Summit Conditions and Mesonet Map pages were designed and built in-house by Mike D and myself. Looking back it was a lot of work and a great learning experience. I have to say my favorite part was working with the webcams to create the public and premium content images and time-lapse movies. We started out with dozens of programs that had been written and modified over the years and we are now down to just three programs that run the entire webcam network consisting of seven webcams on and around Mount Washington.

Last week, Mike D teased everyone with a still image of the moon rising over the Summit. Today, I’ve embedded a video below with two time-lapse movies, one of the moon rising over the summit at sunset and another of sunrise from the North View webcam (both recorded on December 5th). Normally, this content is only available to members of the Observatory but we are giving you a sneak peak at one of our many member perks. You may notice a difference in the video quality between the two videos, the North View webcam is one of two new Axis Q6035-E high-definition webcams that David Raizen of Scarsdale Security made possible. I’d like to extend a personal thank you to David, Dan, Jim and the folks at Axis who all helped make this possible.

We’ve got more updates to the website coming soon, so stay tuned!

Roger Pushor, Weather Observer/IT Specialist