Past IEM Features tagged: iem
5,500th Daily Feature!
16 Jun 2023 05:30 AMToday's feature is the 5,500th in the series dating back to early 2002! The featured chart presents the percentage of good votes each day since voting was added as an option in 2005. The big drop out between 2012 and early 2016 was unfortunately due to a logic bug with how feature voting was implemented leading to unreliable vote tallying. That aside, hopefully the up and to the right trend with time is an indication of increasing daily feature quality or perhaps it is just audience empathy that I continue this drudgery. The daily feature is meant to highlight something that is hopefully interesting and currently relevant. Whenever possible, it contains a direct link to the IEM app that generated the featured graphic so to promote reproducible science. So I will keep producing these features and please always let me know of any ideas you have for future IEM Daily Features! Thank you.
Voting:
Good: 31
Bad: 34
Abstain: 1
Tags: iem
5,000th IEM Daily Feature!
15 Jul 2021 05:38 AMToday's IEM Daily Feature is the 5,000th in the series dating back to 4 Feb 2002! The initial purpose of the feature was to drive daily web traffic to the website by highlighting something hopefully current and interesting related to Iowa's weather and climate. That is still generally the purpose today, but it has evolved more to provide a gateway into citizen and reproducible science. The featured content is often direct linked into an "autoplot" application, which allows for further exploration, raw data download, and customization of plot parameters and location covered. For example, yesterday's chart was a plot of July dew point distributions for Des Moines. An interested person might wish to either download that data for further analysis or look at a different month or look at a different location to continue the topic introduced by the feature. The featured chart today doesn't do any of the above, but just plots the accumulation of 'autoplot' applications on this website. The plot is humorous to me as I was about to "draw the line" at 200 total applications being enough, but then have been back to adding more as ideas are offered or needs identified. Anyway, I continue to enjoy writing these and thanks for your readership!
Voting:
Good: 15
Bad: 1
Tags: iem
IEM Turns 20!
17 Jun 2021 04:56 PMWhile the concept and gears start to turn for what is now the Iowa Environmental Mesonet back in the year 2000, this date back in 2001 was the first date of operation for this website under the present address. So today is our 20th birthday! I struggled to come up with a featured graphic for the occasion, so instead I just lifted the code revision summary for the IEM repository on GitHub. The source code for this website started under subversion source control back in 2005 and remains freely available under a permissive license to this day. The bars are the number of source code commits per day and I've attempted to keep pushing things forward as I fix bugs I write and implement new things as requested by whomever contacts me with suggestions! Here's to 20 more years to come!
Voting:
Good: 10
Bad: 0
Tags: iem
Thankful for Storage
26 Nov 2020 05:29 AMHappy Thanksgiving! In honor of today, the project gives thanks for computer data storage advances and inexpensive prices that current multi-terabyte hard drives cost. When the project started 20 years ago, hard drive sizes were generally well below 128 GB. Nowadays, you can get a 12 TB drive for a few hundred dollars. Such expansive storage options allow the IEM to aggressively archive lots of data each day and accumulate a 60+ TB total size as shown by the featured chart. The featured chart only covers one portion of the IEM website archive. In all, it totals around 200 TB.
Voting:
Good: 11
Bad: 0
Tags: iem
4,500th Daily Feature
22 Aug 2019 04:21 AMThis is the 4,500th IEM Daily Feature! This near daily message started 17 years ago (yikes) as an attempt to entice folks to visit the website daily. I try to highlight an interesting plot or map each day relevant to the ongoing weather with some climatological context provided. I also want to provide reproducible plots with direct links to the website tool that generates the image. Some days are more relevant than others and thus you the reader are given the freedom to vote "Bad" if you don't like what you see or "Abstain" if you can't bring yourself to a binary decision. The featured chart today shows two metrics relevant to the daily feature. The top panel is the time of day the feature was posted and the bottom plot is the percentage of votes in the good category each day. Voting was not implemented until ~2005 and the blip downwards during 2014-2016 was due to a website quirk that was likely registering false votes. Anyway, thanks for your readership and here's to another 4,500 daily features to come!
Voting:
Good: 34
Bad: 0
Tags: iem
4,000th Feature
23 Sep 2017 09:02 AMThis post marks the 4,000th IEM Daily Feature! This series started back in 2002 as a means to highlight things happening in weather and climate for Iowa. The once daily posts matured over the years to include Facebook feedback, voting, and reproducible science. The image associated with this feature is known as a word cloud. It summarizes the 3,999 previous feature posts with the most common words appearing in the largest font sizes. Thankfully, the word Iowa ranks near the top! As always, let me know how this feature series can be improved and more relevant for your needs. Thanks for following!
Voting:
Good: 29
Bad: 1
Abstain: 1
Tags: iem
Ever Growing Archive
09 Sep 2016 05:35 AMSince the beginning of the project, the IEM has archived a number of datasets and products to support research efforts. This archive is made immediately available within a browsable directory tree. The featured chart displays a report of the amount of data archived each day and the accumulated size of the file based storage. A number of data points are labelled when archiving changes created an uptick in volume size. Although the cost of storing data continues to decrease, the size of various products that would be nice to archive continues to increase.
Voting:
Good: 20
Bad: 0
Abstain: 1
Tags: iem
3,500th Daily Feature
27 Oct 2015 05:36 AMToday's IEM Daily Feature is the 3,500th! Since early 2002, the Daily Feature has attempted to provide something interesting on a daily basis relevant to the current weather. The featured chart today presents a few metrics about this feature including the time of day for posting it and the percentage of votes that are good. For the past few years, an option was added to abstain for voting as well! The abstain was added for users that never wish to vote good, but do not wish to vote bad either. :)The bottom chart shows a downtrend in good voting, which is hopefully not a reflection of the quality of the features! Some may vote bad as a commentary on the rainy/yucky weather moreso than the feature itself!
Voting:
Good: 23
Bad: 16
Abstain: 8
Tags: iem
3,000th Daily Feature
20 Nov 2013 05:34 AMToday's IEM Daily Feature is the 3,000th in the series! The featured chart presents a time series and linear fit of time each day the feature was posted and the percentage of total votes that were in the good category. The chart shows features getting posted earlier and getting a higher percentage of good votes! Are those two trends correlated? Anyway, I enjoy attempting to provide something informative and relevant each day. The weather is always interesting and the large archive the IEM has collected over the past twelve years provides an endless supply of things to show. Here's to the next 3,000 features!
Voting:
Good: 67
Bad: 4
Abstain: 5
Tags: iem
10 years of webcam imagery
23 Jul 2013 05:30 AMYesterday marked the 10th year of webcam imagery collection by the IEM. This is thanks to our partners (KCCI-TV, KCRG-TV, KELO-TV, and the Iowa Department of Transportation) who allow us to collect and archive images from their respective networks. The featured chart shows the number of images saved per year along with the first image collected from the KCCI-TV webcam in Jefferson back in 2003. These images are valuable environmental data providing easily discernible visual reports of sky and ground conditions. Along the way, over 300 lapses have been uploaded to YouTube, including a very popular Gravity Wave video with over 1.3 million views!
Voting:
Good: 64
Bad: 8
Tags: webcam iem
Archiving Data
26 Jun 2013 06:10 AMThe main goal of the IEM is to archive data and then provide that data for download on the website. The featured chart displays the daily archive size of the imagery and data files stored. Some labels are shown when new datasets were added to the archive routine that significantly increased the daily archive size. The current daily archive is around 15 gigabytes in size, which is many times greater than that of just a few years ago. Thankfully, data storage continues to decrease in cost and the ability to archive many terabytes per year is tenable.
Voting:
Good: 71
Bad: 11
Tags: iem
2,500th Daily Feature
23 Jan 2012 08:05 AMI started posting IEM Daily Feature's back in early 2002 as a means to get people to visit the website daily and also highlight plots that show interesting weather and climate data. Today's feature is the 2,500th one in the series, so the presented plot looks at the time of day this feature message is posted each day. The plot illustrates the process of aging for human males with activities starting earlier in the morning with the passing years. If the trend continues, I'll be posting daily features at 3 AM in the year 2022! Hehe.
Voting:
Good: 30
Bad: 5
Tags: iem
2,000th Feature
10 Feb 2010 04:54 AMIt was just over eight year ago that the first IEM Daily Feature was posted. The purpose of the feature was to post something interesting and relevant to Iowa's current weather and climate. The early years of the daily feature were mostly lame, but after I added a voting option the feature quality improved due to personal pride of not having a poorly rated feature. Today is the 2,000th feature post and the featured image contains a 6x6 pixel square from each feature to illustrate nothing in particular :) Anyway, I am glad folks seem to still enjoy my daily ramblings and I try to make each worth your time to read. Cheers and here is to the next 2,000 features!
Voting:
Good: 42
Bad: 7
Tags: iem
I (heart) Daily Feature
14 Feb 2008 07:15 AMIt is a very special day today, yup, Happy 1500th daily feature! The IEM daily feature started just over 6 years ago and has been entertaining and informing (note the order) the public most every day. The featured image is a montage of individual 6x6 pixels from each daily feature image. You can see how much I love White in the image.
Voting:
Good: 21
Bad: 23
Tags: iem
View larger image
IEM Quilt of Features. A 6x6 pixel taken from each feature. Click image for full screen version.
1000th Feature!
14 Feb 2006 05:11 AMToday is a great day! Today is the celebration of the IEM's 1,000th feature! After 4 years of features, we continue to come up with something interesting and, most importantly, an unique feature title most every day. Since we live in a democracy, you got a chance to vote on the daily feature starting in 2005. It is no coincidence that the highest rated feature is the only one with my picture in it. The irony of the text in that feature was that the camera was nearly hit by a weak tornado in September 2005. Some of my favorite features include: MCC, MCS, MCV equals MESS, A pile of data!, Tornado or Not Tornado?, Insurance Policy, and Hot, Hot, Hot. Care to share yours?
Voting:
Good: 23
Bad: 14
Tags: iem
3 years of features
04 Feb 2005 06:44 AMToday is the third anniversary of the IEM Feature. Back in 2002 the daily feature was added as a way to keep people updated with what is going on with the IEM. We have posted 739 features since then and are flattered that so many people enjoy reading it each day. It looks like Mother Nature wishes to commemorate the anniversary with near record warmth today! Temperatures may be even warmer than some of those cold days back in August 2004.
Voting:
Good: 30
Bad: 5
Tags: iem
A pile of data!
05 Jun 2003 07:25 AMCan you guess how many observations the IEM databases hold? ... The answer is over 350 million! Most of these observations are available for download. Check out the download pages for the ASOS, RWIS, AWOS, ISU AG, SchoolNet, and COOP networks.
Tags: iem humor
RWIS Pavement Temps Plotting
27 Feb 2003 08:40 AMSince the weather is so boring right now, we will be highlighting various IEM web applications in the coming days. Today's app is the dynamic RWIS pavement temperature plotter. These plots illustrate a wide variety of physical processes that occur in pavement.
Tags: iem
GIS Ready!
10 Feb 2003 07:03 AMToday the IEM announces its 'GIS Ready!' initiative. Look for this icon to appear with links to GIS ready data. Also check out notes and presentation from the upcoming AMS annual meeting.
Tags: iem
Welcome School Net Data
13 Feb 2002 08:36 AMWith the help of KCCI in Des Moines, the IEM is proud to announce the addition of KCCI's School Net data. We are pursuing data from other TV networks as well.
Shown above is a partial network plot valid this morning.
Tags: iem