What's new
Ship log, newest first. Everything here is live on the map or the boards.
Tropics, observations, and a camera that goes where storms areJuly 28
- Tropics page (🌀): every NHC active system with its public a-deck guidance — GEFS member track spaghetti, deterministic aids, the NHC official forecast, and an intensity envelope against the Saffir-Simpson thresholds. Tracks render on the full basin, Cape Verde to the East Pacific. (Public a-decks carry no ECMWF — licensing; we say so rather than hide it.)
- Surface observations: ~4,000 METAR stations as classic station plots — temperature, dewpoint, wind — refreshed every 5 minutes from the AWC cache. Measurements beside the models.
- Frame control: snap the camera to any CONUS region or lower-48 state.
CAESAR AI program pausedJuly 28
- The in-house Pangu-Weather rollouts (CAESAR-OP) and their ensemble arm (CAESAR-ENS) are paused pending dedicated compute — the fleet cost roughly 60% of the pipeline box and drove launch-week contention. Verification history is retained; the program returns when it can run without competing with the streaming pipeline. Consensus, the in-house multi-model blend, remains live and scored on the board.
Parameter parity across every modelJuly 28
- Seventeen new fields per family, capability-gated to what each agency actually publishes: 2-m dewpoint, 10-m wind, feels-like (wind chill / heat index by regime), total cloud cover, simulated reflectivity, 700 and 925-mb temperature, 700-mb RH and vertical velocity, 1000–500 thickness, 500-mb height anomaly (vs ERA5 1990–2019), 500-mb absolute vorticity, PWAT, snow depth, freezing level, ML/MU CAPE, and CIN.
- Winter accumulation chains: run-total 10:1 and Kuchera-ratio snowfall, freezing-rain and sleet liquid equivalents, plus HRRR updraft-helicity run-max tracks and HAILCAST hail size.
- Euro precip-type — the first global family with a native P-type layer, from ECMWF's open-data WMO codes.
- GOES-West joins the satellite section (GeoColor, clean IR, water vapor) alongside the East channels, and a terrain relief overlay joins the stack.
Verification grows to the standard canonJuly 28
- The surface board gains a variable toggle: 2-m temperature, 2-m dewpoint, and 10-m wind, each scored against the same RTMA analysis with identical day buckets, time windows, and issue-cycle splits.
- The synoptic board now scores Z500, MSLP, 850-mb temperature, 250-mb wind, and PWAT at fixed leads against the GFS analysis, with anomaly correlation (vs ERA5 climatology) on Z500.
- Issue-cycle filters: see whether 00Z/12Z runs (full radiosonde network) actually beat 06Z/18Z — measured, not folklore.
- The board is now one panel: every scored parameter — surface, upper-air, precipitation — behind a single selector. Models appear only where they bank that parameter; no greyed rows, no empty columns.
CAESAR: four cycles, honest ensemblesJuly 27–28
- CAESAR-OP now runs all four cycles daily (00/06/12/18Z ICs) plus overnight archive backfill to keep the run picker sixteen deep. Backfilled runs are excluded from surface verification by construction — no hindsight on the board.
- CAESAR-ENS rebuilt: 24-hour lagged-analysis perturbations (pressure-level only), control reuse from the OP rollout, lagged members, and a public spread/skill calibration line.
- GEFS (16 members) and EPS (6) member products: Z500 spaghetti, precip/freezing/snow probabilities, and click-anywhere plumes.
Trust surfacesJuly 27
- Pipeline status: per-feed freshness against each source's real cadence, the job table, and per-service failure states — the same metas the map serves, nothing curated.
- The scoreboard's synoptic table re-ranks by whichever lead you click; models move as the parameter changes.
- Saved places on the forecast page; deep links to any layer and variant.
First-party everythingJuly 26–27
- UKMET now streams directly from Met Office AWS open data; ICON from DWD; GEM from ECCC — every model family is first-party from its agency.
- GPU isoline rendering for pressure: banded MSLP with true isobars, box-smoothed to keep terrain noise out of the lines.