Inspiration
The TruWeather Solutions challenge at UAlbany's WeatherHack hackathon
What it does
Uses fine-grained weather data from the NYS Mesonet to show an accurate, updating map of the precipitation falling across New York state, including whether it is frozen or liquid.
How we built it
First night was spent on design; figuring out what exactly we wanted to do and what tools we were going to use. Decided to just go with a simple Java desktop application. Spent the next day coding, deciding what data to use, and putting together our pitch (with 3 team members, each of us focused on primarily one of these tasks).
Challenges we ran into
The data we were provided with, which was supposed to be 'clean', actually had a lot of missing values.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Actually got an application that works reasonably well for the task it is designed to do done in the time frame of the hackathon.
What we learned
"Wheel of morality, turn, turn, turn. Tell us the lesson that we should learn..."
What's next for Weatherhack
If any one was interested enough to pay us to further develop the application (TruWeather? Mesonet people?) we could use a more sophisticated formula to determine where and what kind of precipitation is falling. There is also testing/bug-checking and generalizing of hard-coded values to do, and for the hackathon we were given prerecorded datasets, whereas what we would really like to do is gather the data from the Mesonet in real time.