At just about $40, StormPredator is an awesome tool for weather freaks and nervous IT groups.
Weather can be nasty stuff. As most of you know (particularly if you live in Florida or Tornado Alley), and as some of us have experienced, a lightning storm can easily become a recipe for spending lots of money and enjoying sleepless nights.
So what can you do? Well, knowing when a serious storm enters your area can make a huge difference to how and when you handle shutting down and unplugging systems. You could watch weather forecasts on TV (sketchy at best) or check an online weather service. The problem with the latter is you have to actually have someone monitoring the service for weather in your locality. Here’s a great alternative: StormPredator from IntelliWeather.
StormPredator is a Windows 2000 or XP (Home or Pro) application (it also will run under Microsoft Virtual PC for Macs) that downloads radar data from the national Nexrad Radar network and tracks weather in near real time. The really cool thing is StormPredator can detect when bad weather enters your area and alert you.
Nexrad (which stands for “Next Generation Radar”) measures precipitation and wind speed. The system transmits radar pulses that are reflected back by water in the atmosphere, trees, buildings and so on. By analyzing the received pulse strength along with the time it takes for the pulse to travel to whatever reflects it (what we’ll call the target) and back again, and the Doppler shift (the pulse’s frequency shift due to the speed of movement of the target), then removing the “noise” created by the reflections from stationary targets, the Nexrad system can measure the reflectivity, direction of movement, and speed of precipitation.
There are a lot more technical issues, including the removal of signals returned by static objects, such as buildings and trees, as well as the different types of reflectivity and conditions that weather radar can measure. For those of you who wish to wade through the details, the Weather Underground has a very good primer on weather radar.
After you install StormPredator (very easy), you select your location, and you will be presented with a novel display: a simulation of an old-fashioned radar scope complete with a sweeping beam (you can switch this off).
There are a lot more configuration options, the most important of which is to specify a scan zone – a circular area of whatever size you please centered on your location. You then set the threshold for precipitation level and sensitivity at which you want alerts to be generated. Alerts can be displayed on the monitor with an optional warning sound or include e-mail and smartphone messages.
Once a storm is detected and you’ve been alerted, you can predict the path and arrival of a storm cell at a given location using the track function. You select the cell’s approximate center at three previous times, and Storm-Predator will display the projected path as a trapezoid, where the center is the most likely path and the boundary of the trapezoid is the likely variance of the path. Clicking within the boundary displays the approximate arrival time of the cell at that position.
StormPredator also can display loops of recent radar data, and download forecasts and maps of weather warnings. It also automatically saves regular snapshots in PNG or JPEG format that can be uploaded to a Web server for integration with other content.
At just about $40 this is an awesome tool for weather freaks and nervous IT groups.
Our other topic this week is Gearblog: As you have hopefully noticed (we wonder how you could not have; we have shamelessly pushed it everywhere we could), we have a blog (along with around 30 million other masochists). As it has been going for some time, we wonder what you think of it. Do you read it? Is it useful? Entertaining? Informative? Boring? Are the blog items with links for Gearhead and Backspin useful? What would make you really happy if we were to add, subtract or change? Please let us know.
Comments to gearhead@gibbs.com. Check Gearblog for links and notes for this column.
