2022 Site Updates

Some links and images are no longer available in our older site updates. Additionally, some information is no longer applicable.

For the latest site updates, click here.

We have now added dark mode to the interactive displays we have for saved historical radar imagery on our historical data page, as well as for our NOAA radar display and mirrored Bahama radar display. We also upgraded the code there to be a little bit more mobile friendly. For the displays there that used an ArcGIS map, we also upgraded the version used to the latest version. (4.24)

Other than in the model and recon systems, other pages at Tropical Atlantic now have the new mobile layout, which contains a dark mode option. That can be found on the settings page found in the footer at the bottom of the page or in the "About" menu in the header. As previously noted, it might be a year or two before the model and recon systems get the new layout.

There are still additional customizations to make to the code as we improve it further on the pages we have already converted.

We have yet added the dark mode feature to the interactive displays we have, such as for saved historical radar imagery on our historical data page. We also have not yet updated the front pages of our other Tropical Globe sites. Because they are on separate sites, and we don't want to use cookies across sites, we'll have a settings page for each individual site.

Our "About Us" page is the first page to use our newer mobile layout. Some other pages, including the site update page, also now use the new layout. We also have a new "Settings" page which allows you to select some settings.

I made a change to most pages that involved renaming most CSS files as well as header and footer files that are displayed using server side includes (SSI). Hopefully everything still looks normal. The update involved renaming some of those files in the model and recon systems to reflect a year of 2020. In all other places, the year 2021. Future updates will reflect the location where all other places previously read it from. This will allow me to update, page by page, the most recent mobile layout that exists to the newer mobile layout. Meanwhile, the model and recon systems will continue to use the much older layout that is not mobile friendly at all. In those two systems, I can't really change anything easily until I update the entirety of the systems, which as previously described could take at least a year or two.

This week I have begun what could be a multi-year process of updating the model and recon systems. I will first start by updating the layout on all pages that aren't a part of the model or recon system. That, in the coming months, will be applied to the existing pages on Tropical Globe's sites that are not part of those two systems. I hope to replicate some of what I learned redesigning CaneTalk, a site I help with, to be mobile friendly. While I have already made the areas other than the model and recon systems mobile friendly, there are improvements I would like to make.

Then, the hard part, updating the code of the model and recon systems, including updating the layout to be mobile friendly, updating mapping to ArcGIS and various improvements to hopefully make the systems more efficient. Hopefully I can make some of the files generated smaller and hopefully decrease the number of files created. This month I made a backup of the site, including all Tropical Globe sites, and there were 658,000 files and 79,000 folders for a total of 18.6 gigabytes of data.

Due to the changes to those two systems, updates cannot occur until the systems are rebuilt offline and tested offline. Therefore, it will be either 2023 or 2024 before the changes are applied online or the updates would break the current systems.