There are many forecasting tools for those who love powder. But what about corn? I aim to fill the gap.
CornCast fetches and displays relevant information for spring skiing/riding in one place. Try it out here.
At the moment, the layout is a simple four-panel (2 x 2) dashboard:
- Top left (Observations): Current conditions at the nearest weather station to the location. Station identifier and altitude are provided. Data from NWS.
- Top right (Forecast): NWS point forecast for the zone closest to the location. This forecast point is usually different from the nearest weather station, so continuity with the observations pane is not expected. Coordinates and elevation of the forecast point are also displayed.
- Bottom left (Snow Depth): Current snow depth reported by representative SNOTEL sensor. If there is no representative SNOTEL sensor for a location (e.g. Mt. Shasta), this graph is left blank. SNOTEL data is collected by NRCS and accessed via SOAP API from CUAHSI.
- Bottom right (Tabular Forecast): Daily summary of quantities relevant to corn formation. For the moment, this includes 1) freeze-thaw cycle, 2) chance of precipitation, and 3) wind speed.
CornCast is built with noaa-sdk, pandas, and Plotly Dash. Fast timezone lookups are courtesy of tzfpy.