The February aggregations are in and available at ForecastWatch.com. There are two new aggregations: 6-9 days out, and 10-14 days out. Still in beta, but wanted to share with everyone. It only affects folks that have forecasts out that far. One issue still needing fixed is that it just pulls whatever forecasts a provider has in those days out, so for a provider like NDFD, which doesn't go out all 9 days, it's not a fair comparison with those that do. So I'm looking to only aggregate providers that have forecasts in the full range of days out.

The Groundhog's Day Snowstorm really increased pageviews on the weather sites, and I think a number of sites experienced records. I know you all experienced web accessibility challenges during that time, but other than a small increase in retrieval times, ForecastWatch was able to retrieve forecasts throughout the surge in visitors. Unfortunately, the same can't be said of the NWS website. They turned off the point forecasts completely on January 31, and only made them available to about 25% of the sites on 2/1 (mostly areas affected by the snowstorm). Despite limiting functionality, page load times skyrocketed seven times above normal. My point is not to bash the NWS, but to congratulate everyone on the list on keeping things going during the blizzard.

I know you all probably know this, but historically, page load times on the sites ForecastWatch collects from have experienced the greatest increases during winter snowstorms. Not even hurricanes seem to cause load times to increase as much. Only during Katrina did load times increase close to what I see during winter storms. Perhaps its because it affects a smaller area, or that snowstorms are more sudden, but just an interesting data point.

Have a great month! We should be rolling out the beta of the new interface soon, and I'll send a link with it so you can look at and comment.