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Sunrise at Lucky Peak, 1998 Link to 50kB, 600x400-ish version |
27 Apr 2016 The 19th season! Light update of the index page for the end of service of the Real-time Observation Monitor and Analysis Network (ROMAN). And the BSA has been maintaining a weather station at Barclay Bay during the sailing season for several years now.
25 May 2008 Now in its 11th season!
19 June 2006 Guess I'll update this page once a year whether I need to or not? An interactive map to sailing spots is new, and I've put up quick links to it and the other main pages. Our Boise Sailors Association and its Google Group are new.
The links section on this page had gone woefully stale, I just refreshed them.
4 June 2005 Updated the daily reports and current observations/forecast page with the recently moved RAWS feeds (for Mountain Home and the Lucky Peak Nursery). The Mountain Home AFB NOAA/NWS feed continues to have intermittent availability, so we're sticking with the RAWS (remote automated weather station).
Thanks to Chris Lee for suggesting the Hailey-to-Boise pressure difference as a key parameter of interest. Higher pressure in Hailey combined with easterly flow appears to be a sure-fire indicator of good morning wind. The difference is now reported in a "dP" column on both the daily reports and the current obs.
24 May 2003 Regular updates to this page aren't new, I can see that. There's a new season of morning wind underway. I've sent 2002 daily reports to the morgue to join previous years, and started a new set for this year, with the usual calendar index on the sailing home page.
I've implemented a (now defunct) mailing list for local sailors that includes a web archive of messages.
1 Sept 2001 Updated uppertv.html to use the new METAR pages, in anticipation of the discontinuance of the old server. Added the Lucky Peak Nursery (near Spring Shores) remote automated weather station (RAWS) to the three "regular" stations, converting the numeric (and UTC) time and wind information to the "basic" format.
The daily reports will now be coming from the METAR pages as well, with a slightly more compact format.
3 July 2001 Added the Upper Treasure Valley page, for my own convenience, but you might like it, too. Quick loading snapshot of the 3 local NOAA reports with links to the NOAA (local) and iWindsurf (Gorge) forecasts.
13 May 2001 Included an excerpt of the local NOAA reporting stations, with the three latest hourly observations for each of the three stations. One-stop weather summary, inline with the index page.
21 Jan 2001 Added the sunrise chart for this year. I'm working on automating the reduction of the Navy's text tables to a compact graphic, for whatever location you please. The index page's image is a sample.
Fall 2000 Moved the site to WestHost, under my new domain name, fortboise.org. That will enable me to get a cronjob fetch of data, and automated graphical reporting going. Some day.
19 Aug 2000 Overdue update to the index page, including reference links. No regular daily reports from NOAA or sailors this year, as I've been on an extended business trip in the Bay area. I still collect the NOAA data, I just haven't been reducing it or republishing.
25 Mar 2000 Updated the Spinout FAQ with a pointer to an article about Anti-Ventilation Skirt (AVS) boards. I haven't seen one of these myself...
Mar 2000 Moved the site to Earthlink.
8 Jan 2000 Running out of my 5MB allotment, time to pack up the old year. The 1999 index and daily reports are bundled up in a 192kB file (available on request), and the index page stripped down to the bare links.
19 Dec 1999 Cleaned up the list of 1999 daily reports, added one for "opening day" on April 17th, and closed the season on October 23rd. No hits on the mailing list idea, or the gear for sale, so I removed that stuff.
28 Sept 1999 Added a list of late/off-season opportunities - sailing in Baja in December, invitation to join my mailing list, gear for sale, invitation for advertising your gear for sale.
1 Sept 1999 I changed the wind plots to PNG instead of GIF. Hope that works for your browser. For more on why, visit Bob Niland's page on the subject.
29 Aug 1999 I finally got my data reduction code running, using perl and the CPAN graphics modules. The hardest part was getting smart and not screwing around with CorelScript. A sample of the new version is in the updated barbkey.html file. (Which is misnamed, given that I'm showing the wind with "spears" rather than barbs... they read better for me.) I crunched August's data through today and generated 29 graphics files in about 4 seconds. Perl rocks. Now I just need to twiddle it into the rest of my automation...
1 Aug 1999 "Full NOAA perl script"
If you have
perl
("Practical Extraction and Reporting Language," a wonderfully useful
computer Swiss Army knife and alternate lifestyle)
on your system, this is pretty cool. It grabs the three local NOAA
observations (Boise, Mountain Home, Caldwell) and puts them into an HTML
template. The output file is an all-in-one personalized observation
report, done in about the time it takes to fetch one of the NOAA
pages with a browser! This page has links to the program, the template,
and information about how to make it go on your machine. (Not for the
faint of heart.)
1 Aug 1999 This page is new!
25 July 1999
Brute force update of the previous couple weeks' worth of the
daily pages, with text tables of NOAA data. Updates from here on are more
or less daily, when I'm in town.
9 July 1999 Wind barb graphical report
Sample 3 stations x 1 day graphical report, using more or less
conventional weather map wind barb notation. I like the idea, but not the
execution, given the tools I have. CorelScript for CorelDraw is badly
documented, and very buggy, and the worst of it is the poor GIFs it
exports. (No, those little specks are not dust on your screen, nor from
my computer.)
1 May 1999
Mike Ferguson's early start - April 17th, if you can believe that -
got me re-started. First thing is to fetch sunrise and
moonrise tables from Navy, and
massage them into daylight time and HTML.
I'm one of several dozen windsurfers who enjoys sailing on a reservoir of the Boise river, Lucky Peak Lake. Stable high pressure sets up a thermal flow between central Idaho mountains and southern Idaho desert that can blow impressively from sunset to noon on a great day, and from sunrise to a few hours after, on an OK day.
Last year, I got the idea to combine the local NOAA observations with sailing reports and put them on the web, to try and improve everyone's ability to correctly answer the question "should I go sailing this morning?" Most places in town, it's either calm or at most a light breeze. The wind at the airport (Boise's official reporting station), Mountain Home and Caldwell are indicators, but quite indirect: "SE 6" for Boise can mean it's blowing 15 or 20 mph up at the lake.
If I were charging by the hour, I could have (maybe should have) bought a weather station and installed up at the lake by now. Call of the Wind (now iWindsurf said they'd do it for $1000. There are some "remote automatic weather stations" (RAWS), including one up at the Lucky Peak Nursery near Spring Shores, but they're positioned for fire fighting, not for sailors.
But I'm not charging, of course. This is just a quirky little hobby of mine. You can play, too! Send me ideas, requests, whatever, and sailing reports!
Local NOAA reports
Boise observations
Mtn Home observations
Caldwell observations
Hailey Observations
The National Weather Service forecast for Boise has a ton of current and near-term information, more links. The Missoula office has put up an interactive map of the weather stations in the whole Pacific NW.
Air Sports Net's Surface Condition Weather Forecasting for Air Sports Aviators takes NOAA raw data and forecasts and wraps it in whizzy graphics, station by station.
iWindsurf has broad sailing weather coverage, mostly for subscribers only, now.
The Spinout Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) file, from half a decade ago, inspired by rec.windsurfing.
NOAA RAWS (Remote Automated Weather Stations)
The University of Utah's weather links collection will take you a while to get through.
The US Navy Observatory's sunrise calculator
Tom von Alten tva_∂t_fortboise_⋅_org