Success!

Weather.jayctheriot.com was able to script the retrieval of weather information from 178 different buoys in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) along the coast from the Texas-Mexico border to the Florida Keys. I still have the East, West and Hawaiian coasts, but that’ll be in the days forthcoming.

You can see it here: GoM Buoy Data Feeds. The page isn’t much to look at. The buoys are listed alpha-numerically. I have a map planned and will be organizing them according to geographic location. Additionally, conditionals will be embedded in the page creation so that interesting or dangerous conditions can highlighted.

The data is scraped from NOAA’s https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/.

Seems like a repetition of work? Kinda-sorta-but-not-really. The buoy listing is a step in the process. Now that the data is scraped from the NOAA servers, they can be archived in jayctheriot.com’s database servers and analyzed for aberrant weather conditions.

What I have found over the 18 years of tracking weather disturbances with algorithms, is rarely the challenge the algorithm or processing of the data. The real problem is GETTING the data. It costs money to generate data, and thus, it’s generally made difficult to find. NOAA has changed their data availability over the last couple decades. They now make access the default. In the early days, if it were made available, it was on some cryptic ftp site that may or may not be listed publicly. I’m very glad that’s changed.

I am excited to see what products I can churn out for the public with this new access. Stay tuned.

Thanks for reading,

Jay C. “Jazzy J” Theriot