You might be surprised to know that I wasn’t here for it.

My family moved to Charleston (specifically, Goose Creek) in the summer of 1988. But during the summer of 1989, my dad’s job relocated us to Dalton, PA (yes, I lived near Scranton before it was popular). We rented out our house (with the full intent of returning once my father was finished with his assignment in PA), and watched nervously as Hugo made a direct hit on the Lowcountry. Fortunately, just the fence took a bit of a hit, and we only lost one tree (and it evaded the house). We returned in the summer of 1990, and in the winter got a fun snowfall (that has unfortunately yet to really repeat itself).

I was a weather nut before Hugo, but I have to wonder what my attitude toward hurricanes would be today had I gone through it. I remember talking to a lot of my peers when we returned, and most said they slept through it. But others told tales of howling winds and trees snapping and general chaos — and the silence of the eye. The stories of the eye were the most fascinating to me, and are probably a driving force for me to try to experience what it’s like in that eerie calm, on the stage in a stadium of destructive power.

But somehow I might find that what happens prior to and after that calm might dissuade me.

Say hi to Ana and Bill. Ana’s got a shot at a South Florida landfall on Thursday, while Bill’s a bit too far out to call, though the early model guidance is encouraging for a recurvature before it hits the U.S. Time will tell — and these things are notorious for being unpredictable.

I’ll be doing periodic updates on the Charleston Weather blog as we learn more about the storms’ implications for our weather. TheDigitel’s hurricane page is a good place to monitor as well, and if you’re into maps and data and more maps and more data, I must recommend SCHurricane.com (@schurricane on Twitter) by the good guys at WCBD News 2. It’s pretty much every relevant map conveniently linked in one place.

So, stay tuned. It wasn’t going to stay docile out there forever.

You may remember the Charleston news hashtag summit-of-sorts. The meeting brought together media members, active Lowcountry bloggers, and concerned Twitter citizens. We hashed out a series of tags that would classify tweets accordingly. There are tags for news (#chsnews), breaking stories (#chsbrkg), and the like. The goal of using these — and really, any hashtag — is to bring related content together so people can filter their streams accordingly. These tags have met with moderate adoption; I’ve personally seen some tags more than others. One of them, #chswx, is one focus of my FriendFeed group.

Nuts & Bolts

The Charleston Weather FriendFeed group is fed from four sources:

• @chswx on Twitter, which automatically tweets forecasts four times a day and also serves as the location where I live-tweet severe weather situations
• The Charleston Weather blog, which will house longer-form weather analysis (expect this to really kick into gear as hurricane season starts up) as well as news about new services
• A Twitter search for the #chswx hashtag, with messages originating from the @chswx account and retweets of the @chswx account filtered out to lower noise
• User-originated posts directly from FriendFeed. Anybody can posts links, photos, etc. to the group.

The feed for #chswx is probably the most important one to come in, because it enables others to contribute to the group without even having to have a FriendFeed account. Having #chswx come into the FriendFeed group honors the ideals of what we were trying to do at the hashtag summit as it lets us aggregate and rebroadcast.

The only snag? Twitter Search is fed over RSS and is not realtime. The functionality’s not yet there to return realtime results to a FriendFeed group — that would be an immense improvement in terms of timeliness of data. For now, we’ll have to still monitor Twitter for the late-breaking stuff.

Why FriendFeed?

So, why FriendFeed? It’s only emerged as the best social data aggregator out there. Its flexibility and power are unparalleled, especially now that FriendFeed is completely realtime. That, combined with its discussion and sharing (“likes”) components, make FriendFeed the ideal platform. It can be delivered in realtime over e-mail or IM, filtered with a fine-toothed comb — basically, if you need to do something with the data, FriendFeed lets you do it in any way that’s convenient for you. Its rich sharing (inline photos and videos) plus integration with Twitter make it an instant win for a project such as this. Plus, thanks to tools like BackType, we can tie FriendFeed comments back to originating blog posts, which I suspect will be critical functionality in hurricane season.

Will it work?

The whole “Charleston Weather” reporting concept is a gigantic experiment; the FriendFeed group is another component to this. We won’t really know how well it’ll work until we have a heavy weather day, and people take pictures and make reports with the hashtag. On sunny days, the Charleston Weather group will probably resemble just another automated push service. On stormy days, though, it has the potential to become a great repository of photos and reports, which could be invaluable to media outlets or even the National Weather Service as they collect information for storm postmortem reports.

Expect to see more movement with the hashtags feeding into FriendFeed soon. We have a Charleston, SC group that is a great candidate to feed in other tags, such as the news hashtags, #chsfree for free stuff to do, and the all-important #chseats for announcing BBQ meatups.

• On Twitter, I’ll live-tweet the storm event at @chswx. If you just want warnings and forecasts, I recommend @CharlestonWX. Also see @weatherwatches for advance notice of potential watches. Don’t forget local media, as well, including Rob Fowler, Josh Marthers, Joey Sovine, and the Live 5 Weather Team.
• I’m uploading radar images periodically to radar.charlestonwx.com. There’s an animation script which gives you 10 frames and many Level III products to play with.
• If time permits, I’ll do some writing with more detailed analysis at my new weather blog. Given the fast pace of these storms, blogging may be somewhat prohibitive. (It’s much easier to blog a hurricane than it is a springtime weather event.)

Despite all this technology we now have, your best defense is to have a NOAA Weather Radio and make sure to heed all warnings that come down from the National Weather Service or other emergency management officials. Remember, the Internet is a great tool, but is not intended for life-or-death decisions. Stay safe out there!

Now that Serious Business is done, it’s time to give my weather efforts the same treatment. The work on that started very, very early this morning, culminating in a somewhat buggy rough draft of the beginnings of a brand new Charleston Weather site at charlestonwx.com. It’s very simple and straightforward at the moment, showing only current conditions. Over the next few weeks I’ll be pulling forecasts and advisories. Also, weather blogs written here at jaredwsmith.com will be extracted and migrated over to a dedicated Charleston Weather blog (with copies retained at jaredwsmith.com for posterity).

I’m leaning towards retaining the spartan appearance of the charlestonwx.com homepage. The goal I’ve had with all of my forays into weather is to provide the pertinent information as quickly and clearly as possible; I think the design — while it certainly will see many tweaks as time goes on — is a good framework to start with. I’m currently using the Weather Underground API to bring the data in; this is a short-term solution while I examine more real-time alternatives.

Some additional changes will be made even outside of the website proper; the Charleston Weather Twitter/Identi.ca feeds will become a bit more automated with hourly conditions updates. I’m also working on bringing in real-time advisory reporting (including watches and warnings). The effects will be two-fold: It’ll make the Twitter accounts a bit more useful, and it will relieve some of the stress on me to manually update them a lot. I’m going to have dramatically less time to do that in the next few months as my day job is amping up (I’m going to set some personal records for slow days on Twitter soon), so I want to make sure that the high level of service people have come to expect from @chswx is maintained.

Thanks to everyone who’s kept an eye on my weatherblogging and tweeting efforts — I’m looking forward to further growth and improvement to these services.

NWS Charleston has noted accumulations of up to a quarter inch in Colleton County, with a trace of snow throughout the Charleston metro. I, personally, have seen a few flakes but nothing really out of the ordinary just yet. I’ll take video if/when I do. However, it seems as if the heaviest snow is remaining to the south and west; no telling if it will creep a bit more northeast. NWS keeps us in a 60% chance of snow and a Winter Weather Advisory until 11 PM, so it’s likely that we’ll see a bit more snow in the area before it’s over. Major accumulations aren’t expected; rather, the threat will be from puddles where it rained/sleeted earlier this morning refreezing overnight, as temperatures are expected to dip into the lower 20s inland (mid-20s near the coast). Wind chills will be somewhere in the low teens again. (It’s clear that Old Man Winter is reasserting himself after that absolutely balmy December.) Be very careful driving tomorrow morning in rush hour!

This morning I started the #omgsnow09 hashtag for Twitter users to make snow reports; there have been a lot of reports in North Charleston, and a couple in Summerville as well. Keep an eye on that one throughout the evening as more reports roll in. Also, watch @chswx on Twitter for updates as needed.

Temperatures will rebound fairly quickly, though; Tuesday gets us into the upper 50s and by Wednesday we’ll be flirting with 70 again. This sets us up for a warm and wet Christmas, unfortunately, with another system slated to come through that day. That system won’t modify our temperatures much, and we’re slated to be in another warm weather pattern through the weekend.

So, keep those jackets handy, but also keep an eye on the short-sleeves, as you’ll be reaching for those again by midweek.