Thursday, March 24, 2016

Learning Google Maps

Inspired by the upcoming Race to Alaska, I put together a web page that integrates the nice JSON weather reports from the OpenWeatherMap API, plus some XML format reports from NOAA buoys.  These get drawn on a map with wind barbs.  You can scroll around to see various areas on the map, and click on a station to get more details.

It tracks the recent reports and attempts to compute an hourly rate of change for some statistics.  Depending on the time between reports this can be an inexact science.  But it helps to see if wind, pressure or temperature is changing rapidly.

The back end code is written in JavaScript using Node.js.  The front end is HTML and JavaScript and the Google Maps Javascript API.