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In 2020 alone, mobile apps from the App Store and Google Play Store grossed more than $111 billion from in-app purchases according to SensorTower – a nearly three-fold increase from 2016. With so many great mobile apps launching every day in a hyper-competitive market, understanding your options to produce incremental revenue is crucial. Advertising remains one of the most popular means of monetization for consumer mobile apps, but we’ve all thumbed through apps and been interrupted by ads that completely disrupt the user experience. Crafty developers are circumnavigating this need to advertise by incorporating advanced features for a monthly or annual fee,...

Header Image: Docks In By Late April?Paul Douglas Summer Heat Building Gulf Coast. Looking out 2 weeks GFS guidance shows a series of annoyingly persistent cool fronts impacting the northern tier of the USA, while the start of what looks like an early summer heatwave is taking shape over the southern U.S. 8th Cloudiest April Since 1963 at MSP.Minnesota State Climatology Office “Mescocyclone”NOAA What is a Mesocyclone? Not your generic, garden-variety thundershower. Meteorologist Brad Panovich at WCNC.com explains: “…A mesocyclone is not something you hear all the time, but when your local Meteorologist says it, that likely means there is...

A Real Warm Front Arrives Saturday With apologies to The Beatles, Minnesota’s transition to summer is a long and winding road, littered with stormy potholes. It often comes down to situational awareness – keeping tabs on the weather pattern and listening for county-specific watches and warnings. But don’t neglect gut feel. In August of ‘09 conditions were ripe for twisters. I remember watching the sky turn green, running down to our dock and taping the formation of a tornado, roughly 5 minutes before the sirens sounded. A green tint to the sky may be the result of large hail. Tornado-producing...

Have you always wanted a powerful interactive weather map for your website but felt overwhelmed by all the coding required? Perhaps you know how to code, but you don’t have the time? Well, luckily, there’s now a wizard for that. Introducing our newest wizard: The Interactive Map App Wizard. The Interactive Map App, which is part of the AerisWeather JavaScript SDK, allows users to build a powerful mapping tool for a personal weather dashboard or integrate it into their own custom weather site.  With the new Interactive Map App Wizard, you can click your way through each step and customize what you want your custom weather map application to look like. In the last step, we’ll...

August 10, 2020 File ImagePaul Douglas In Defense of Summer Thunderstorms During thunderstorm season I still stare up at the sky with 5th grade wide-eyed wonder. During the day towering cumulonimbus castles charge across the sky. At night the lightning can resemble a Stephen King novel: giant, mutant alien fireflies hovering nearby. I never get over that. If we didn’t experience thunderstorms Minnesota’s climate would be similar to New Mexico. Precious little would grow here. If you hear thunder there’s lightning somewhere nearby. Keep in mind ANY thunderstorm is potentially dangerous. 1 in 10 will become severe, fewer than 1...

Springtime in the US signals the start of the severe weather season, bringing severe storms, hail, and tornadoes from the central plains through the mid-Atlantic and the southeast US. With this extreme weather, there is a need to accurately and quickly inform the public. To assist, AerisWeather offers a selection of severe weather APIs, mapping layers, and our new severe weather module for use within interactive maps. One of the unique severe weather endpoints, within the AerisWeather API, is the Threats Endpoint. The Threats Endpoint provides information on potential storm threats affecting the US, Puerto Rico, and Guam. What is the...

  “Frosted Tips”. The rising sun illuminated the tops of the trees for a few wondrous moments SundayPaul Douglas From Slush to Hail and High Water Season My favorite weather transition is going from slush to hail. Not really, but I’m paying more attention to hail events in recent years. There is no evidence that a warming climate is making hail larger or more frequent, at least not yet. Maybe we’ve just been particularly unlucky, especially when large hailstones pound the densely populated metro area. According to The Insurance Federation of Minnesota, homeowner insurance premiums have TRIPLED in the last...

NOAA 2021: Big Environmental Challenges Remain ”He that plants trees loves others besides himself” wrote 17th century historian Thomas Fuller. Much has improved since the first Earth Day in 1970. Big challenges remain. Warming gases are increasing faster than anytime in the geological record; the 6 warmest years on record observed since 2015. Worldwide: 50 separate billion-dollar weather disasters in 2020, a new record. More than 4 out of 10 Americans breathe unhealthy air, with a disproportionate impact on people of color. Every day 2 million tons of sewage are flushed into our rivers and oceans. Every year 9 million...

ECMWF vs. GFS Accuracy Since 2007. The data is the data.Graphic courtesy of blog.weather.us and meteorologist Ryan Maue. Will a New GFS Model Upgrade Close the Gap with The European Model? Here’s an excerpt of an article I wrote for Aerisweather: “Are you with Team GFS or Team ECMWF, the “European Model”? I hate to pick sides, but as a meteorologist I defer to the weather model that, consistently, is most accurate. Of course I’m rooting for the “American Model”, the GFS or Global Forecast System, to win. But here’s the thing: if you’re sanding a table or building a...

NOAA Climate.gov NOAA Climate.gov Tracking the Trends. NOAA will be shortly releasing (formally) the new 1991-2020 average weather data for the USA. The graphic above shows how much of the USA is trending not only warmer, but wetter over time. The “averages” are reacting to a warming Earth. Looking Warmer. The transition to summer is always a rocky road, but GFS guidance is showing a stronger warm signal for the first week of May as a ridge of high pressure builds over the central U.S. – an “Omega Block” keeping the west and New England unseasonably cool. On March 25,...