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Follow Meteorologist D.J. Kayser on Twitter (@dkayserwx) or on Facebook (Meteorologist D.J. Kayser). Have you been to your grocery store recently and noticed a shortage of certain vegetables, including broccoli and cauliflower? Chances are that answer is a yes – and you are not alone. There is currently a shortage going on with a number of vegetables, including some lettuce. According to the most recent report (December 10th) from Produce Alliance, a produce management, procurement and consulting company, there are 14 crops that they have a “produce alert” on. Right now, the say that “demand exceeds supply” on broccoli, with this situation expected...

Our big project these days is a major overhaul of our map tile servers for our Weather Overlays API. We’re moving the entire codebase over to Node.js and using mapnik to generate tile images. Performance and resource usage is a major concern. We need to generate images for more than 20 different weather data sets, some of which update as often as every 2 minutes. To keep our maps snappy and not break the bank, we need to do a really good job caching at every level of resource creation. There are several great caching libraries out there, but we had...

We deal with large data at Aeris Weather. Multiple weather metrics, every few square kilometers, updated every few hours covering several weeks, across the whole globe… oh my. And that is just forecast data. A continuous stream of observations, storm cells, fires and other data in addition to forecasts presents our engineering team with a variety of challenging scaling problems. As we take a deep breath to think about how much data that is, that is just the ingestion side. Much like you as you exhale once again, our applications need to output the data back out in meaningful ways to our...

Version 1.1.1 of the AerisWeather Android Weather SDK is now available. This version of the SDK includes access to additional AerisWeather API endpoints. These include observation/summary and new data attributes like Ultraviolet Index forecasts. So read on for highlights of the new data waiting to enhance your Android weather applications! Updated Endpoints Forecasts So first up is the Forecasts endpoint. The following attributes are now available as properties within the forecast object: ice accumulation min and max humidity min, max and average feelslike and dewpoint UVI (the ultraviolet index, an integer from 0-12) 80 meter winds (wind data at a height...

In a 24-hour period from noon on Tuesday, Nov 17 through noon on Wednesday, Nov 18th, more than 1,000 storm reports were reported across the U.S. The AerisWeather API provides quick access to these reports for use within applications, including many of the available javascript and mobile mapping platforms. Today, we will step through adding storm reports to an interactive map using the AerisWeather API, GeoJSON and the Leaflet mapping library. AerisWeather API now has GeoJSON Support The 1.4 release of the AerisWeather API added several new features, including GeoJSON support. GeoJSON is a common method for transferring geospatial data between...

Our next minor version of our Aeris iOS Weather SDK is now available with several new features and a whole lot of bug fixes and improvements. Supported iOS Versions With iOS 8 and 9 adoptions at 90-95% and iOS 9 adoptions quickly rising to near 75% according to Apple and Mixpanel, our iOS SDKs are currently being developed to only support iOS 7 and higher. However, we have plans to drop support for iOS 7 by next summer once iOS 10 is released to developers as users running versions older than iOS 8 should fall below 5%. New Data Sets...