Welcome, we've noticed that this is your first time visiting The Snowfall Project. We'd like to take a moment to introduce you to what we have to offer and where you might find it.

First and foremost is our database of weather data from the Northwest Weather and Avalanche Center (NWAC), which is a division of the US Forest Service and NOAA. Although we don't collect all the data from NWAC we do collect the major Ski Resorts from the Northern Cascades. These you can view from the Mountains menu on the top bar. We also display the NWAC forecasts from the Forecasts menu.

In addition to the storage of the weather data we've provided a service that allows the graphing of this data over time. Using the Graph link on the top bar will bring you to a page allowing you to customize a graph to fit your needs.

You may return view this introduction again if you wish by viewing the about page from the Help menu. The Options menu allows you to pick which page you are shown when you visit this sites root page. Also you can save a set of graphs that you'd like to view often (most likely ones with one of the numerious special dates)

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About Us

Who are we?

In reality the people behind the Snowfall Project is just one person, that is Ian Turner. A student at Bellingham Technical College working on his Associates Degree in Computer Networking. Although that wasn't what he was doing when the whole project started. In 2003 he was just a highschool freshman looking at a boring next 4 years. Over a few months just after starting highschool he worked on it on his free time (which was quite a lot). Some help from David Foster went into the actual first version of the text table parser.

Our History

We started out in 2004 with a very rough version of what you now see. The current version is what Ian calls version 3. Version 1 was the barebones while he was still learning PHP and MySQL. It was based off a modded phpBB, the popular forum software, that version worked well for the timebeing. But after feeling guilty of mooching server space and bandwidth from his oldest cousin he purchased an account with Dreamhost and updated version 1 to the popular blogging platform Wordpress.

A little less then 6 months after that update Ian rewrote the whole project from scratch including the aging parser. The new version he hopes will be easier to manage as a lot of the variables that actually changed from location to location were hard programmed into the code. The new version extracts those variables and places them in CSV files for use anywhere on the site, from the parser to the search results also the grapher.

Also in version 3 is some new features Ian has wanted to implement for a long time, some dating back to the beginning of the project. Including the ability to save default graphs, and dates that aren't fixed such as 'the past 24 hours', 'the past 3 days', 'one week', 'one month' or even 'season to date'.

How it Works

The life blood of the project is the hourly updater. It fetches the text tables from the Northwest Weather and Avalanche Center (NWAC) and looks at the table as if it were columns. Using the PHP substr command we extract the values of each column for every row. Each row then gets checked to see if it is already in the database, and if it isn't it gets added.

After that comes the user interface. Coded from the ground up in version 3 it doesn't use any existing framework and has just what is needed to get the job done effectivly. We make use of cookies to store all user saved data eliminating strain on the database.

Why we do it

The reason Ian created it was the fact that when looking at the NWAC text tables is ugly and even produces them in backwards order to natural reading (Newest at the bottom instead of the top). This type of remote telemetry data is very useful for seeing patterns that develop over multiple years, possibly even decades.

Another reason is that text is hard to read properly if the user is wanting to know if it has snowed a lot in the past week. Using the stored data we can produce dynamic graphs that meet the users needs everytime.