Wind Forecast Layer

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When I added the weather forecast layer this summer, I mentioned my frustrations with the way the NWS requires you to bring up endless point forecasts to get an accurate picture of local precipitation amounts.  With the Northern California fires, I’m running into the same issue with wind – I’ll read about a forecasted red flag warning, but the Napa and Santa Rosa forecasts barely hit double digits.  I’ll admit that I had no idea wind speeds were so locally variant – or at least, no idea that the NWS forecast grid captured such small-scale variations.

24hr wind gust plot.  From 15mph in St Helena to 50mph on Mount Hood just 3 miles away.

Fortunately I already had wind speed mapping on the back burner – it didn’t get deployed along with the earlier temperature and precipitation work, but most of that code was reusable.  I can’t show wind direction – even if I were to render directional arrows on the map, frequent direction changes make it impossible to show a single meaningful 24hr or 36hr wind direction.  However peak forecasted wind speeds and gusts are shown for 1hr, 6hr, 12hr, 24hr and 36hr intervals, using the same green-yellow-orange-red-purple-blue-black gradient scale as the temperature layer.

One option that does provide wind direction is the crowd favorite windy.com.  However, windy does not reflect the small-scale variations in the NWS forecast grid (see below).  As with temperature and precipitation, it’s an open question as to how accurate the NWS grid variations are, but I like to provide as much raw data as possible and let users draw their own conclusions.

Windy.com plot of the same location

The wind layer is a checkbox option alongside temp and precip:

The forecast grid option immediately below will also show point speeds (remember, the point is simply the center of a grid square, and the forecast applies to the entire square), and clicking on a point will bring up the hourly weather chart.

I feel like I’ve pretty much run through the backlog of fire-related items I had sitting around, so I think this will be the last major layer change in response to the Northern California fires.

Update: there are now two wind layers, the “max wind speed” layer as described above, and a “wind plot” that provides forecasted directions and speeds for specific points in times, at 3 hour intervals to 12 hours, and then 6 hour intervals to 36 hours.  The same color chart is used for speed, with short lines tracing direction.  The length of the lines has no meaning.

High Resolution Post-Fire Imagery

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Thanks to a generous offer from a contact on the Google Crisis Response team, CalTopo is temporarily displaying high-resolution imagery for portions of the fire-affected areas in Napa and Sonoma counties.  This imagery was taken by DigitalGlobe on Wed the 11th, and although the fires are still ongoing, it provides some degree of insight into what had burned by that point.  While there is a lot of smoke present, in many areas it’s clear enough for a house-by-house assessment.

Because the original imagery is false-color infrared (which gives vegetation a strong red tint), I’m converting it to black-and-white to avoid any possible confusion between the red tint and currently burning areas.  I’m told that true-color imagery will be available at some point on Fri, and hopefully I’ll be able to upgrade the layer to match.

Available imagery footprints, with fire outlines shown in red.

Step 1: Go to https://caltopo.com/l/16PD

Step 2: Enter your address in the search field at the top of the page and click GO:
Step 3: Use the zoom control at the top left of the map to zoom in:
Step 4: Mouse over the layer selector at the top right (it should read “Hybrid +1”), and in the window that comes up, adjust the “NorCal Fire” opacity slider to expose the pre-fire imagery:
It may also be helpful to temporarily turn on the “Current Fire Activity” checkbox in order to see the fire perimeters:
I’ve put some temporary infrastructure in place to help handle this project, but if the site is impacted too much, I may need to make some changes.  The shortlink at the top of this article (https://caltopo.com/l/16PD) will always point to the right place – if you share a URL, please share that.

NorCal Fire Response

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The quick summary:

  • If you are seeking information on the Northern California wildfires, or trying to understand CalTopo’s current fire activity layer, please see this blog post.
  • Edit: big thanks to the Google crisis response team for rapidly lifting the map quota.  The OpenLayers warning no longer applies.  CalTopo will be intermittently running on OpenLayers instead of Google Maps.  If the zoom controls at the top left of the map viewer are blue instead of white, Google layers (map, terrain, satellite) will be unavailable, and text based location search will not work.  You can use the search bar to locate lat/long or UTM coordinates, but not named places.
  • The current fire activity layer now includes VIIRS 375m detections as well as MODIS.
  • CalTopo now sports a new mobile UI.  If you have issues with it, please let me know.

The details: in case you’ve been living under a rock since Sunday night, California is on fire:

Sunday night’s VIIRS capture: fires that look like cities

On Tue morning, CalTopo started seeing increased visits from people looking at the fire activity layer, and pageviews rapidly grew to well above normal.  This caused some scaling issues, but barring another order of magnitude in growth, those are temporarily solved with a combination of software fixes and throwing hardware at the problem.

The larger issue is that I ran into the 100k pageview limit for the Google Maps standard plan, and CalTopo stopped loading.  I’ve fixed this by switching to OpenLayers, which is the map viewer used in CalTopo Offline, but it’s not a perfect substitute: in addition to missing Google’s map layers, text-based location searches (like “santa rosa, ca”) will no longer work.  The version of OpenLayers I’m using is also old and heavily customized, so there may be some compatibility issues with touch gestures on mobile devices.

I’m working with Google on fixing the issue, but in the meantime, I’ll turn on Google Maps at some point in the morning, and leave it on until the quota runs out.  If the zoom +/- buttons at the top left of your screen are white, you’re using the Google Maps viewer and everything should function normally.  If they’re blue, it means you’re using OpenLayers.

In order to better serve people looking for fire information, I’ve also held a marathon coding session to wrap up and deploy two back-burner upgrades.  The first is the addition of VIIRS 375m fire detections alongside MODIS.  At more than double MODIS’s resolution, VIIRS should provide a more accurate picture of the fires’ behavior.  Although VIIRS suffers from a limited number of passes (just like MODIS), adding a second source will increase the layer’s all-important update frequency.  And certainly the most common question I’ve gotten today is “when will the layer update”?

Looks just like MODIS, but with more points

The current fire activity layer was already customizable (smoke vs no smoke); now you can choose all sources (a mix of MODIS and VIIRS on the same map) or view them one at a time for a cleaner image.

The second change is a revamped mobile UI.  Normally I’d hang on to a change like this for another month or two in order to test it thoroughly and smooth out the edges.  However, the vast majority – > 90% – of people seeking fire information are doing so on their phones.  And, the previous mobile UI was non-functional enough that I’m unlikely to make things worse.  I know it’s 2017 already, but now the CalTopo mobile site supports 90% of the features the desktop site does.  More details in a later post once I get things cleaned up, but in the meantime let me know of any bugs.

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