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Follow @DSCRASP
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You may have noticed a couple of odd looking entries on Twitter ( http://twitter.com/#!/dscrasp ). It looks a bit like this: DSCRASP > Thu 0 ; Fri yes ; Sat 0 ; Sun yes ; Mon 0 ; Tue 0 ;I'm trying out a new feature that predicts whether it'll be flyable in the Peaks on each day based on forecast data. In addition it'll try and predict whether it'll be a cross country day and how good the day might be on a scale of 1 to 5. The idea is to help with planning your week, a lot like the original Weather Jack website. Every day the next five days is going to be listed with a 0 if it doesn't look flyable and a "yes" if it does. If the forecast shows it may be a cross country day then "XC" will show with a number up to 5 giving an idea about the quality of the day. I've chosen some sensible values and limits but obviously a bit of fine tuning is going to be necessary. If you think it got a prediction for a day wrong let me know. Also if you think the data could be displayed a bit better then give me your suggestions. If there's enough interest I could add a feature to email interested people if there's an XC day that shows up. More Detail... At around seven each morning RASP is polled for 1pm data and several factors are checked that would prevent it being flyable if they had the wrong values. The wind should be no more than 14 knots, it should be less than 0.3mm rain per hour and the cloud base should be above 2000 feet. If one of these is out then the day is marked as zero or unflyable. For XC conditions, a few more factors are checked. The thermal lift needs to be above 250 feet per minute and the day's start rating needs to be above 1.5. Also the wind can be up to 18 knots because I'm making the assumption that on an XC day you're likely to have taken off earlier than the 1pm time that the values are taken from. These are sensible values for the Dales but will need to be adjusted for your area of the country. Send your suggestions in a mention e.g. to @DSCRASP and I'll make a tweak. A note to club website owners; you can have the Tweet widget on the left appear in your website by dropping a bit of javascript into your page. Here it is:
<script src="http://widgets.twimg.com/j/2/widget.js"></script>
<script>
new TWTR.Widget({
version: 2,
type: 'profile',
rpp: 7,
interval: 30000,
width: 300,
height: 500,
theme: {
shell: {
background: '#499992',
color: '#ffffff'
},
tweets: {
background: '#fab914',
color: '#ffffff',
links: '#0748eb'
}
},
features: {
scrollbar: false,
loop: false,
live: true,
behavior: 'all'
}
}).render().setUser('DSCRASP').start();
</script>
Cheers, Pete.
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