Step 1 - NWAC Data Feed Views

One more notion - from your web site, it appears that you likely have more experience thinking about info design than many of the skiers on the site, but many are surely quite good at making smart use of the telemetry data.

So in addition to asking folks what views they'd like, another useful question you may get some great answers to from this crowd is "What questions do you try to answer when you look at the Telemetry data, and how do you do it?" You may think of more useful views that answer the questions than they would. I'm a big fan of giving the designer as much info as possible about the desired use of the thing they're designing, and some of the answers you get back might be interesting surprises. My bet is that the answers will suggest a few new views to you, and each view you come up with will help answer multiple questions.

I gave a few examples of such questions in my post above. A few more (with "how" added):

-I hint at this in my last post - does it appear likely, at this site, that the new snow started as rain on top of the old snow-or-crust? How does this change by elevation (for sites with temps at multiple elevations)? I see when the precip started, and track temps starting a little before that forward throughout the precip event, looking for whether/where temps crossed over from above to below freezing (and of course check the avy forecast snowpack analysis - that goes w/o saying for all these questions).

-Did temps get close to or above freezing since the last precip X days ago? I'd dig through the archives day-by-day since the last dump and scan the temps at the various elevations where I'm going.

-Where should I go skiing tomorrow (or this morning)? Compare across the latest tables for at least two sites (possibly a few more - I always have specific destinations in mind), checking new snow, temps, and maybe wind speed/direction. Usually looking for whether one of the sites got significantly more than the others, but sometimes I'm actually looking for where there's less (when it's been dumping crazy and I want to avoid figure 11s).

Hopefully this is the sort of input you're looking for...

Jim,

Your input is great.

I'm asking mainly because although I plan on doing my own internet applications for this next season, I also expect other developers to use the web service I have created to develop their own applications. Lets face it, there are plenty of people in this state capable of doing much more with the data than I am but to keep service response time down there needs to more than one view that shows specific data results. No reason to weed through an entire xml doc just to get the last updates from each ski resort station.

Right now I am running basic queries to show the graphs. (ie-Select the data from Alpental where it lists the total snow (or temp or whatever) and only show the last 24 hours) Well, now what about showing all of the stations' total snowfall for the entire season? How about just showing the last hour's snowfall and temperature in one view?

In your case, doing very specific views about wind packed snow or viewing two locations side by side to help make a better decision about which one is most ideal but I'm not as skilled about making accurate data results as other scientists who have spent as much as 10 years figuing out how. This is an invitation to help make something I see as one of the most valuable resources for our community available to more than just our little pod of core skiers and boarders.