Florida Catholic | Following Fay easier with Web software

Following Fay easier with Web software

KAREN OSBORNE | FLORIDA CATHOLIC STAFF

Published: 08.21.08

Stormpulse, developed by Matthew Wensing and Brad Wiemerslage, gathers existing weather data from reliable Internet sources and presents it in an elegant, easy-to-use interactive manner. Click on the image to view and work with the Stormpulse map.

Screen Capture
Stormpulse, developed by Matthew Wensing and Brad Wiemerslage, gathers existing weather data from reliable Internet sources and presents it in an elegant, easy-to-use interactive manner. Click on the image to view and work with the Stormpulse map.

ORLANDO | As a boy growing up in Lake Worth, Matthew Wensing, 26, remembers the Saturday pre–hurricane drill quite well: Board up the house. Take it all down. Board it up again.

While many of these hurricanes veered away at the last minute, he remembers the ones that didn’t.

Wensing, a software developer, watched from a desk in Chicago as Hurricanes Jeanne, Frances and Wilma slammed into Florida, battering relatives’ houses in Lake Worth and West Palm Beach. He clicked through one Web site after another, unsatisfied that he couldn’t find an application that would answer all of his questions. Frustrated, he decided to make one himself.

“I saw that the data was freely available and ripe for the picking. All I had to do was write the code,” said Wensing, who works as a Web developer for the Palm Beach Post.

Wensing and a colleague from Chicago, Brad Wiemerslage, put together Stormpulse.com. The Florida Catholic will be using the Stormpulse application to track Tropical Storm Fay as it continues its erratic travels across Florida and to keep an eye on any future storms that might affect the newspaper’s statewide coverage area.

Stormpulse is a visual, map–based aggregator that ties together free but often scattered meteorological data from NASA, the NERC satellite station in Dundee, U.K., U.S. National Weather Service hurricane advisories and other meteorological tracking centers to present a comprehensive picture of the past, present and future of a hurricane or tropical storm: Where is it now? Where will it go? How bad will it be?

Stormpulse users can check how far a storm is currently, or will be, from their city; can see projected storm positions, wind speeds, wind fields and strengths in a visual format; and can view the clouds over the state and the locations of affected ocean buoys that provide weather data.

“The challenge is bringing it all together without making it intimidating and confusing, because it’s easy to make people feel like they don’t know where to begin,” he said. “I wanted to have everything: the latest coordinates from one place, history from another, advisories from another.”

Exposure on other Web sites — and Tropical Storm Fay’s erratic behavior — boosted the use of the application, he said. Before Fay, Wensing was excited if “a thousand people” checked the site during Hurricanes Dean and Felix. The day Fay made landfall in the Diocese of Venice, around 200,000 people viewed the map, both on stormpulse.com and through dozens of affiliate sites such as the Florida Catholic, a fact which Wensing thinks is “amazing.”

Wensing is happy that his application — developed in part for the Palm Beach Post but free to embed on any Web site — can help Floridians better prepare for dangerous tropical weather and get the answers they need.

Although the basic program is free, future possibilities include paying applications for businesses, landlords and other companies that “have assets in multiple locations,” he said, to help customers better solve “simple problems like when do we send everybody home” or what the risk is to exposed facilities and equipment.

Whatever happens, “I’m taking it one step at a time,” he said.

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