Severe Weather Awareness Week, Website Updates!

I will warn everyone upfront, this post is going to be long. First of all we are now in Awareness Week, I try to keep it simple and say have access to information and have a plan. Here is a link to the NWS, please check it out and refresh yourself. If you find you can be a bit more prepared, it is never to soon, severe weather can happen anytime. I encourage everyone have a weather radio with s.a.m.e technology. With this you put in your county code, the radio will then only alarm you if your county has a watch or warning. The model I own has the ability to program to alert for just specific watches and warnings. I have mine set to alarm me of a Tornado Warning or Severe Thunderstorm Warning, it also has the ability to sound for other situations like a nuclear spill or even a sunami.

Okay, now to the website and our hopeful successful upcoming storm chasing season. I now have my video streaming account active and working. I have some new/used equipment coming within the next two weeks to help improve the quality of streaming we will offer. Fair warning, with mobile internet the video will be a fairly low bitrate, around 150 Kbps. We will likely only stream when approaching a severe storm, we do plan possibly streaming from the house if we are unable to go mobile. If you go to our chase page you will see I have inserted a “chat” box, this will enable us to communicate with others live while on the road. You do have to sign up and verify your account. Below the chat box is our video screen, if we are not streaming it will just be a black with an arrow. Next to the video stream is a map showing our position tracked via gps, in this box you can even enable the radar button to see where we are in relation to storms. We will try to notify all people signed up for chat that we are heading out. You can also go here and install a notifier, I have not tried it but you will have access to 400+ storm chasers streaming video. You can personalize it to only notify you when certain streamers are live.

I guess that is it for now, look for this week to be in the 50-60 degree range, with 1-2 inches of rain. This is not the “boring” weather of the last couple of weeks, sorry Bob, no golf for you! ;)