Sector(s)
Finlandweather is a platform where you can check records from road cameras in Finland and get information about weather conditions and emergencies in a specific point of the country.
About the project
The website was created for Antti Koskella, the founder of Youlearn it Ltd. It is a unified hub to get information about weather, traffic and alarms.
What makes it distinctive is daily statistics of emergencies:
- road traffic accidents;
- fire alarms;
- building fires;
- people saved
The website is synchronized with 100+ Finnish weather stations displayed at Finnish Meteorological institute. The information is updated automatically.
For example, Rain radar map shows the measured strength of the rain. Data is updated every 15 minutes.
Weather Cameras display photos of roads.
Here you can get information about:
- weather conditions in a specific location
- possible traffic accidents nearby
The data is updated every 30 minutes.
However, not all the meteorological stations provide data on air temperature, humidity, average wind speed and others.
Clicking on Emergency alarms you will find out the number of emergencies, their location and exact time.
Location button also shows other accidents that have happened in the area around.
The website is really complex on back-end. The most difficult parts of the project were to integrate with Finnish Meteorological Institute to get information and updates from there. Another challenge was data migration from Digitraffic API for locations, stations, cameras and photos (all source data is in JSON format).
As for Cameras, the map was made with Leaflet.
Website design is simple, and it’s never been a top priority. Back-end functionality is what makes this project so prominent.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was chosen primarily to handle large amounts of data. Moreover, Drupal has a built-in tool for importing data and can easily integrate with other services, which has been a vital functionality for such a project.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
We created three custom modules to display pages and slider; to receive data from Finnish Meteorological Institute and for camera map.
Geolocation module helps create maps and display markers on them.
It is convenient for maps’ customization.
Migrate tools and Migrate plus broaden migration functionality.
Migrate cron was used to launch migrations on cron.
