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Purdue's Weather Seen Everywhere

Daniel Vietor

http://thunder.atms.purdue.edu/

Purdue's Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences has built a web presence that has become the "hot spot" for weather information. Their WWW pages reside on a IBM RS/6000 model 550 with additional accessibility via Gopher and FTP.

Internet Requests

from unique sites          3,600(weekdays)   13,000(weekly)
for images                13,000(weekdays)   70,000(weekly>
individual HTTP requests  80,000(weekdays)  450,000(weekly)

The top level domains seeking our weather information are: .edu at 30%, .com at 28%, .gov at 8% and .net at 6%.

Most Frequent contact

• purdue.edu 3%
• caltech.edu 2%
• nasa.gov 2.5%
• netcom.com 2%

The top image requested is the Satellite Surface Map. This is accessed over 12,000 times per week alone and is linked to over 200 independent home pages. The URL is:

http: //thunder.atms.purdue.edu/gopher-data/satellite/sat_sfc_map.gif

Additional access for the XWP Weather Processor

• sites
  • 700 (gopher)
  • 180 (ftp)
• images
  • 4,000 (gopher)
  • 10,000 (ftp)

Overall, the Earth and Atmospheric site is visited by over 15,000 sites getting over 170,000 images per week. This translates into the server being accessed approximately 2 to 3 times per second with an image leaving here every 2 seconds. This creates a load on the CPU of 10-20%. A load of this magnitude results in the need for a reboot once a week to free up hung processes.

Our weather presence on the web received recognition from CNN Headline News in a story about the Information Super Highway. It has been used as a reference in books on WWW home page design and will soon be in WeatherWise.

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