Home Island: O‘ahu
High School: Kaiser High School
Institute when accepted: Northern Arizona University
Project Title: Haleakala Summit Weather Data Storage and Retrieval
Project Site: Institute for Astronomy, Maui
Mentors: Cindy Giebink, Dan O’Gara
The Institute for Astronomy has collected weather data from the Mees weather instruments for the past 18 years. The current weather is hosted on the IfA website as well as composite plots of the past 24 to 48 hours of data. These plots are created using IDL code and based on flat text files. The means of collecting and storing data was changed when PS1 came into the picture rendering the current weather page system. There were too many points of failure, and for the first time in 18 years, the weather pages were not dependable. Additionally, if researchers wanted large amounts of archived weather data, they would have to contact the IfA and make special arrangements. Our goal was to redesign the collection of data and the weather hosting pages and to make the archived weather data more accessible. We created a MySQL database. The first task was to import the past 18 years of data stored in text files into the database. Then we implemented a program that added the new weather data once every ten seconds. Using PHP and JavaScript plug-ins, it is now possible to create interactive graphs online given the date and other parameters that the user wishes to be displayed. It is also now possible to download all data one year at a time, eliminating the need to contact IfA and request the information. With more time, we will develop a mobile phone application to easily access the current summit weather on the go.