NWAC Forecasts, New Site, New Logo

We have a new look…and a new organizational structure! The Friends of NWAC is going away…sort of. FOAC will continue to be a legal, 501©3 non-profit, but our work has become so intertwined with NWAC’s that it just doesn’t make sense to have two public faces any more. So…just in time for the daily forecasting season to start TODAY, we welcome you to the new Northwest Avalanche Center…still NWAC, but henceforth a collaboration between the USFS NWAC and FOAC. Check out the new website and take a look at the “About Us” section for a complete description of the new NWAC structure. We hope you like the changes, and here’s to a great winter!

Very cool. But I'm a little upset that I don't get bombarded with a donation popup every time I get on now.. can you bring it back?

Very cool. But I'm a little upset that I don't get bombarded with a donation popup every time I get on now.. can you bring it back?

My screen shows that your prayer was answered, Theo-san! 


Perusing it right now for the first time and am liking it.
My url links to the telemetry data still work!
Thanks for the hard work and effort to get this to us, NWAC and FOAC.

I am curious as to why the avalanche rose went away: as a quick look at distinctions based on aspect, the severity colors, and 1000 foot elevational interval vs. the new "treeline" format.  Or am I not navigating somewhere I should be? 
The tab format on the avy forecast page is cool for getting right to observations and telemetry.

I probably just need to study and think about it more.

If NWAC is now a private/public partnership, how can we perceive which individual NWAC/FOAC functions are being funded with tax dollars/legislative influence, by contributions from the ski areas, and what's being underwritten by private donation? They're very different sources of funds, with very different goals and expectations.

FOAC fundraising is sometimes conflated with direct financial support of NWAC forecasters; it's my understanding that they're quite distinct. The last time budgets were reported separately (2012), about 10% of NWAC's operation was supported by FOAC.

FOAC's education and forecaster financial-backstop initiatives are worthy of support on their own. I'm not sure it's healthy or necessary to unite beneath one flag.



With empathy for a new product launch:

The new site's pretty, with elegant whitespace, but it's hard to read quickly. Avalanche.ca's bulletins fit into a single screen on both the desktop and the phone; the new NWAC page takes lots of scrolling. It's hard to discuss the forecast overview with a partner or get a quick overview of the forecast if it can't all be seen at once.

On the phone, with stock Android and Firefox browsers, the site is far less usable. The landing map hardly shows Hood nor the Olympics. Danger scale labels are infinitesimal.  Map regions, especially passes, aren't labelled.

There's no call to action/text way to access forecasts on the main mobile page; choosing to select the "Menu" isn't intuitive.

Google maps mashups are pretty/trendy, but for selecting a forecast zone, a simple clickmap as in the past (and by UAC and CAIC), would suffice. The rest of the new NWAC page loads faster than the Google map.

The mobile view prioritizes space over time: forecasts are broken down first by elevation, then by day. I think about forecasts in the opposite order; I build a picture of what's happening today at all elevations, then what's happening tomorrow at all elevations, etc.  If I'm reading the forecast with emphasis on a particular day, it'll be harder to read the forecast if I have to keep scrolling between elevation bands.  Put another way, it's easy to move between elevations with route choices, but it's harder to move between days.

Are there XML/ASCII hooks to pull forecast information directly? 

It wasn't long ago that NWAC forecasts were available in ASCII text. Please bring that back; it may not be the most-used channel of information, but it's lightweight and information-dense. It consumes the minimum possible uncompressed bandwidth. When web formatting breaks completely, everyone can read ASCII.

Looking at the 2004 site in the Wayback Machine [1], the new generation of sites is so much better.

Avalanche concerns are wonderful. That section of the forecast page is really well-done; information icons too. Black-and-white is great for the colorblind.



Thanks for all the hard work on the site! There's a lot of invisible foundation prerequisite to running a safety-critical user-facing site.

[1] Edit: The TAY software (understandably) doesn't like the Wayback Machine link: web.archive.org/web/20050122220450/http://nwac.us/

kinda like the way these guys are doing it.. www.mtavalanche.com/current

kinda like the way these guys are doing it.. www.mtavalanche.com/current

I lived in Bozeman for several years. I always appreciated the field reports supported by video.