Now with city-level coverage for thousands of U.S. locations and ZIP codes
We’ve spent the last four months working on an update to make Stormpulse.com more local, more beautiful, and faster. And as of this morning, you can go and see for yourself.
Major highlights:
- Home page attempts to geo-locate and route you to a local weather page.
- Current conditions box shows current temperature, conditions, and winds.
- Forecast box shows high and low temperature and an hour-by-hour summary for the next three days.
- Map imagery with a resolution of 500 m/pixel–four times greater than our previous maps (so you zoom in four times closer).
- Speed boost: the map only loads the severe weather information it needs for your current view (no loading or rendering data needlessly).
- Map enhancements–clearer labeling and more beautiful terrain.
Those are the big items. Other items we get excited about:
- When viewed with an iPhone, the weather information is displayed in a friendly, readable fashion (and more mobile support coming soon).
- The ‘Share Map‘ feature now works for U.S. Severe Weather and allows you to share down to the plotpoint for a storm. For example, a close-up view of Katrina bearing down on NOLA. This will work for forecast positions during an active storm as well.
- Improved color scheme for severe weather alerts. In our first attempt at severe weather coverage, we adopted the National Weather Service’s colors entirely. Since then, we’ve seen a few big storms come and go, and a lot of winter storms come and go, and we’ve adjusted our colors to improve visibility on the critical alerts, and quiet down the less important ones.
- Simplified site navigation bar. Fewer choices with an expandable button at the end means less confusion, we believe.
- Intelligent expanding and contracting of weather info boxes in the left column. We are big believers in only showing what matters and hiding the rest. We’ve tried to make some smart decisions about what to hide and what to show by default. Tell us if you disagree!
Since so much of this is visual, I thought I’d include a few more screenshots that do this update justice.
A Winter Storm Watch in Hartford, CT:
Wintry weather in … Texas?! Yep.
As always, we looking forward to hearing what you think.
The Stormpulse Team
