On this day three years ago the Ferny Grove Weather website was launched. It is with great appreciation and amazement of the growth of the continued support of everyone who have visited this website during this time. I would especially like to thank those who have showed a continued interest in the website who have visited many times and especially during times of severe weather.
In the past year a total of 5,629 visits have been made, which is 59 % of all visits made to the website in the past three years. In the past three years there has been a total of 9508 visits that were made by 3713 visitors of which 58% have previously visited the website. Those who have visited this website most frequently (in top 1% of all return visits made) have brought 22.1 % of all visits which were made by 20 unique visitors. This is a large drop compared to last year, as a result of a larger audience who are using this website. A total of 13,343 page views have been made.
It has brought great satisfaction of how this website is used more during periods of severe weather. This was especially the case during the significant weather event in February 2022 which saw a massive increase in visitor activity with 1491 visits by 520 visitors (2294 page views) and over double the previously most active month. This is quite obvious in the information contained on the Website Analytics page.
There is very strong interest in the real time data on this website which received a large proportion of all activity on the website (47.7 % for the home page and 14.8 % for the gauges out of all of the page views). This has however dropped by 27 % with other pages on the website being of more interest than it was previously, mostly notable the Today and Yesterday page.
This website came about based on the desire to upgrade the weather station used for improved accuracy and to shift towards measuring the weather in real-time. This website was built as a personal project to view the data that was easy to access, be updated in an automated nature as nearly to real-time as possible and no matter what screen size I am using. This project have evolved to also experiment with various data presentation methods and to explore programming techniques and technologies.
In the past year new additions to the website to the website include:
- UV Index and UV Dose (Standard Erythermal Dose)
- Upgraded automated process to update the website analytics by rainfall in Website Analytics
- Thermal graphs to Historic Graphs showing Growing Degree Days of daily average temperatures and Temperature Sum of daily minimum, maximum and average temperature
- Heat Map charts that shows logged historical data which may be viewed by hour and day across a given year for a selected metric.
- Wind Rose charts for wind speed for various periods across the entire station period including specific month and years and various recent time periods. This shows the distribution of wind speed by wind direction.
- Various small additions and tweaks
Moving forwards there is much more planned to improve and add to the website and continues with a plan to publish data that to date is not viewable on the website, some of which is currently under development. As this is a personal project and with the complexities involved, it does takes time to complete these additions with the accuracy and use friendliness of the website being important components to get right.
But if there are any specific things on the website you would like to see for consideration or if you have feedback, you are always welcome to reply here or to Contact Us with your thoughts.