Dear Wetterturnier users

Two days left to vote for the synoptist 2019. Alexander (bibertaler) will count the incoming votes. More information can be found in the forum:

Synoptiker 2018 – Abstimmung bis 31.1.2019

All best,
the WT team

The live-scoring which has been implemented early this year for some parameters has been disabled again! The live-scoring was intended to bring some more excitement into the game but it seems that it was more confusing than helpful. Based on some discussions and a wide range of people being disappointed I’ve disabled this feature again. Everything is as it has been in the old days!

Have fun playing, and good luck to everyone!

The new Wetterturnier System was designed to automatically process all observations based on the new BUFR message standard. This worked like a charm before different institutes decided to restrict their data set. Among them is the DWD, but also MeteoSwiss.

Thus, our hard-working and engaged Zurich tournament leaders always had to manually compute and enter the observations of the past weekend, while for all other cities the system took care of it.

Today, I’ve added the Zurich data again. Don’t ask me how I get the data, I just get them! From now on Fluntern and Kloten should both be live (likely with a slightly longer delay than for those stations providing WMO essentials, or open data).

Feel free to call MeteoSwiss and others to blame them, if needed :). My spirit is: open data for an open world, but a lot of institutes seem to be numb.

Please note that this was a 15-min-script, in case it breaks down it might need another 15 minutes of optimization :).

All best,
R

Dear users,

some might have encountered some strange things (the cool new ranking tables and the leader board did never show up). First of all I thought it was a jQuery support problem, after getting the very same report from different people I noticed that it was my fault (or actually an Internet-Explorer fault).

I have committed a hot-fix just right now. If you are an IE user and it works now (or does not): it would be great to get some feedback. Just send me an e-mail (you’ll find my e-mail address on the team page) or a private notification via WT. Would be great to get some feedback (not just now!). Feedback is very important for me as I cannot always test every single detail, my weeks have only 168 hours!

Thanks in advance and have fun!

Greez
R (Reto, in case you try to find my e-mail address)

For all those using “auto-submit” (script based submission of the forecasts/bets) please be aware that there have been some changes due to the changeover from http to https. If you are using the old-school wget commands, please adjust your calls (“wget —no–check–certificate “https://wetterturnier.de/…” …). If you use the small autosubmit-python package change the url in the submission files to “https://wetterturnier.de/autosubmit”. Some more information can be found on the autosubmit description page.

The latest autosubmit.py (version 0.1-3) can be found here:

• autosubmit_0.1-3.tar.gz

Hy gals and chaps! Just a small update what happened in the meantime:

• Added new function to the backend to (hopefully) properly compute the observed Wv/Wn for the next weekend.
• Added some features to the observation table to be more useful (column subset and stuff).
• Some fixes on the frontend: element-styling in the forum, image width of the forecast/analysis maps)
• Optimized the databases, the script calls, smarter includes of some scripts and libraries, and optimized the webserver settings to improve the server response time. Up to now this looks pretty good, hope you may have noticed a difference as well.
• Cleaned the code in the repositories, merged some of the repositories and revamped the structure/locations on the server such that the new generation (code support) can easily contribute in the near future.
• Web-analytics implemented.
• Documentation, documentation, documentation. Round about 80 hours over the last days.
• Including the observations of the stations which have been missing in the past (thanks to Marcus). And shame on me that this took a bit longer than needed, even if it was in the top 3 of the todo list.
• Fixed some small issues in the archive (migration issues). Thanks to Georg for the very detailed analysis and checks.
• Fixed things here and there on the front-end. Not yet everything is properly responsive (e.g., large tables) and might be fixed somewhen 2018.
• Observation plots (version 0.1 😉 ) replaced with a d3 implementation rather than creating static plots in the backend.
• Added a table of the maximum day length which is used to compute the relative sunshine duration to the link list.
• Small adjustments and fixes on the scripts producing the observations for all stations which are used to compute the scores in the tournament. Still some issues open, see forum.

Overall a lot of work, however, if you find something which is either buggy or wrong, or both, please let me know!

I wish you all a nice time and see you here on Friday :).

Greez
R

Well done!

First round finished, as some of you might have noticed is that we moved the deadline to 15:15 UTC today. We got the last “oh my goodness, I can’t even log in” e-Mail 2 minutes before the official deadline ;).

If you have some friends which haven’t taken part today but typically join the Wetterturnier: please tell them they should check their accounts and contact us if they do not work. And maybe not 2 minutes before the deadline :).

Seems that our server responded quickly enough today such that everyone has had enough time to place a bet (who wanted to). However, we are still optimizing and checking what to improve. Your feedback, on the negative but of course also on the positive side of the spectrum is always welcome!

All best by the WT team!

Some hints for the new ones

I’ve just added two new small features. As soon as you are logged in you’ll see your username top right of the page in the black bar. When clicking on it you’ll be forwarded to the user-settings-page. This page now provides two wetterturnier-related options.

Bet-form orientation

This option allows you to set your personal default. The ‘overall default’ is the portrait mode. However, if you prefer the landscape mode simply change and save the setting here. It is still possible to switch the orientation on the front-end by clicking on the “switch orientation” button or by simply pressing “x” once on your keyboard if needed. Available options:

• portrait (which is still the overall default)
• landscape

Table styling

Our ww75 once mentioned that the contrast of the tables seems to be relatively low and it will be relatively hard to read the information. There is now an option to change the user-specific default table styling. At the moment three different options are available. The overall default is the same relatively neutral one with a lot of white. However, you can now switch to the two alternative styling’s called “contrast” and “orange-blue” (see below):

• default: the neutral white design
• contrast: brutal contrast (don’t take this too serious!)
• orange-blue: a version similar to the old wetterturnier