MyUMBC is now featuring a weather website that informs students about that day's weather as well as the weather forecast for the week. Its popularity is soaring; it receives about 191 visits a day. This project is largely due to 5 people at UMBC: Dr. Ray Hoff, who oversees the running of the website; Dr. Wallace McMillan, who provides the needed resources to make the weather information live; Tony Salemi, who helps code the data systems and maintain them; Tim Milligan, who designs the graphics and layout for the website; and Paul Schou, who codes the web portion of the website to make it live.

Hoff is an associate professor of Physics. Schou is a graduate student working on his Master's/Doctoral degree in atmospheric physics. "I got my undergraduate from Michigan Technological University in Physics. I am currently a TA for the physics department and I help with the Atmospheric LIDAR Group," said Schou. Milligan and Salemi are undergraduates as well in Physics/Computer Science. Salemi will graduate in the spring of 2007 with a physics degree. He plans to get his Master's in Atmospheric Physics at UMBC. McMillan is a Physics professor and the Atmospheric Physics Graduate Program Director.

Said McMillan, "Going back in time a few years, in becoming a professor at UMBC in 1998, I had plans for a weather station on the Physics building in order to have critical measurements for some of the experiments I also had in mind. Mainly, it is critical to know the wind direction in order to correlate measurements of air pollution made from my lab with possible sources in the area." So, there was a larger picture behind the website. Added McMillan, "In researching weather station instrumentation, I learned of Automated Weather Source (AWS) and their Air Watch system. At that time, both the Baltimore and Washington NBC TV stations were sponsoring purchases of AWS systems by local K-12 schools to form a network of weather stations in the Baltimore/Washington area."

There were benefits to the AWS systems as well as the website. Explained McMillan, "Purchasing our own AWS system would give us online access to all the other AWS stations, provide a large database of local weather observations for Geography classes to use, and give UMBC a little publicity whenever one of the TV stations used our site on air. Using some of the startup money UMBC provided me to set up my lab, I purchased an AWS station in December 1999. Dr. Hoff also wanted to have a weather station on the roof, so he contributed the cost of the specially designed ten-meter tower, which the UMBC Physical Plant installed on the roof."

That was only the beginning. "The weather station started operation in my lab on March 5, 2000, and was installed on the rooftop tower the afternoon of April 14, 2000. Since then, it has operated continuously. As part of a federally funded project to improve weather measurements in the Washington area, AWS replaced our instruments this past summer, free of charge to us," said McMillan.

That would lead to the website, with the help of others. Emphasized McMillan, "The look and information on the current UMBC weather page is entirely due to the work of Paul Schou, Tim Milligan, and Tony Salemi." Adds McMillan, "Work on the weather webpage started in 2001. An information specialist with JCET, Lisa LeBlanc, started work on archiving the weather data in March 2001. On October 18, 2001, the weather data first went live online through the Physics web server. In the summer of 2004, undergraduate Matthew Gitt added daily and monthly averages and daily plots to the weather page. This past summer, Tony Salemi enhanced the plots and improved the archive. Paul Schou began revamping the web page this summer and with Tim Milligan, they have developed a great looking page for the entire community."

The weather was first tested on my.umbc.edu on the 25th of August of this year. Adds Schou, "the new look and feel of the weather website was released September 18; this included the tabs at the top of the page to keep everything organized and the updating live weather at the top." The initial release had positive results. "This generated a lot of positive feed back and we were excited to see how much people enjoyed it. There were some bugs so it was taken down, but these were fixed and then it was re-released on October 10," said Schou. The final result is what students see now.

Constructing the website itself is quite complex and utilizes modern technology. "The website uses many information sources. The current environment information, such as the temperature, wind speed, humidity, and rain is measured with our own AWS weather station located on the physics building and has an update speed of every second. This information is archived every minute and has been archived in increments of every 1-5 minutes for the last 6 years. The information such as the forecast, satellite pictures, and air quality are cached from NOAA, NASA, and EPA respectively. This is updated at about the rate at which they provide it into the public domain," explained Schou.

However, maintaining the website is much easier than its actual construction. "We do not do periodic updates except to change something. The website is run mostly by the scripts that we wrote which make the entire system autonomous," added Schou. That does not mean no further work was required, however. Emphasized Schou, "The website content is maintained by all of us; we contribute to our own respective areas. Tony has been involved with data processing including the graphs and the archives. Tim did much of the design work. I have been coding the routines, which do the live data processing up to the second and the general workability of the website."

Said Salemi, "I maintain the data flow to ensure automatic updates take place on the webpage and that no errors occur. I have worked for Dr. McMillan since the summer of 2005. Matt Gitt, who graduated in 2005 with a Physics degree, worked with me the first summer and taught me the ropes."

Overall, the website is very accessible to students and has a simple feel to it that makes it easy to understand and thus is popular with students. Explained Milligan, "I came up with the layout by drawing some pictures of what I think makes for a good website. The stuff that everyone wants to know, such as forecast, radar, and temperature are on the front page, while the more detailed stuff that few people want to know, such as details about air quality, are on tabs that are hidden. The style of the logo came from the way the art was drawn for the album "Mmhmm" by Relient K, and all the art tries to follow from that. I'm still struggling with how to carry this style through to stuff." As a result, students can see the current forecast as well as the seven-day forecastâ€the pertinent thingsâ€but not be bombarded by the more detailed components. The logo also adds to the feel of the website.

The UMBC weather team would like to give "many thanks to Collier Jones and Jack Suess for the support in making this happen." The overall hope is "to see more student development take place with the data we provide."