Mesonet Station Status
A real-time station status map for the Montana Mesonet, built and operated by the Montana Climate Office.
About
Shows the current reporting state of every station across the HydroMet and AgriMet sub-networks. Two view modes:
- Status — single threshold: dot color reflects whether the station has posted within the last 2 hours.
- Time since — five bins of "minutes since the latest record," ceiling at >24 h.
- Health — three classes. Operational: reported within the last 2 hours with every expected sensor present. Partial: reported within the 2 hours, but one or more expected sensors are null in the latest record (the popup lists them). Total outage: no report in the last 2 hours, or no record at all.
In Health mode the legend footer reports sensor-list loading progress and, afterwards, how many fresh stations have no sensor list (those count as operational).
Color is Crameri's roma from the house palette (MCO.palette, mco-web-style 0.12.0), sampled at 0.1–0.9 and reversed: blue = fresh → pale → brown = stale. It is perceptually uniform, ordered, and safe for the major color-vision deficiencies, and the two ends differ in lightness, so they survive grayscale.
Other features:
- HydroMet / AgriMet sub-network toggles with live counts. Hiding a network dynamically resolves any stacked sites at that location to single dots.
- Search box with a custom themed dropdown (8 results, scored by relevance), keyboard navigation (
↑ ↓ Enter), and a / global shortcut to jump to it from anywhere on the page.
- Plotly-style interactive legend in the lower-left: click a row to hide/show that category; double-click (or Shift+Enter) to isolate it. Every row shows the live count and share of the selected networks' stations in that category (label, count, percentage); hiding a category never changes its count.
- Co-located sites — the HydroMet station is always the visible anchor with a count badge. Hover (desktop) or tap (mobile) to fan the others out; a second click on a foot opens that station's popup.
- Toggleable station-ID labels with collision-based dodging.
- Hover tooltip with station name, ID, latest timestamp, and relative time — all in the viewer's local timezone.
- Tribal lands overlay — the 7 federal reservations in Montana drawn as a subtle fill + outline, with names at zoom ≥ 7.
- Montana state outline so the state shape reads as the primary frame.
- Dark → light → high-contrast theme button (high contrast uses the dark basemap) with neutral CARTO Positron / Dark Matter basemaps designed as data-overlay canvases.
- Map controls: zoom in/out + a "zoom to full extent" button (top-right). Zooming out below the state-fit zoom springs back; resizing the window also snaps back if the viewport drops below fit.
- First-visit help dialog auto-opens once so newcomers get the orientation.
- Honors
prefers-reduced-motion and prefers-color-scheme.
Sharable URLs
Every piece of UI state is mirrored to the URL via history.replaceState. The view is fully shareable and bookmarkable.
| Param | Values | Notes |
|---|
lng | float | Map center longitude. Omitted at the default Montana fit. |
lat | float | Map center latitude. Omitted at the default Montana fit. |
zoom | float | Map zoom. Omitted at the default Montana fit. |
mode | status | timesince | health | Visualization mode |
net | +/space/comma list (hydromet+agrimet) | Active sub-networks. Empty = none. Case-insensitive. |
scat | list (fresh+stale, null) | Visible Status-mode categories. Omitted = all. |
tcat | list (0+1+2+3+4, null) | Visible Time-since bins (0 = <2 h, 4 = >24 h). Omitted = all. |
hcat | list (operational+partial+outage) | Visible Health classes. Omitted = all. |
labels | on | off | Station-ID labels |
legend | open | collapsed | Legend panel state |
theme | light | dark | high-contrast | Theme override. Omitted when it matches the OS preference. |
station | station id (e.g. aceabsar) | Open this station's popup on load; deep-link |
Precedence per setting: URL param > localStorage > built-in default.
All enum-string values (mode, theme, labels, legend, network names, category keys, station IDs) are matched case-insensitively. List params accept +, spaces, or commas as separators.
Examples:
/?station=aceabsar
/?station=aceabsar&lng=-109.61&lat=45.56&zoom=12
/?mode=timesince&net=agrimet&theme=light&labels=on&legend=collapsed
/?net=hydromet+agrimet&scat=fresh+stale
Data sources
Health cross-references the two: an expected element whose description_short column ("<description_short> [<unit>]") is null in the station's latest record counts as a sensor not reporting. The element lists are fetched once (one bulk request, or 8 concurrent per-station requests on the fallback path, ~10 s cold for the full network) and cached in localStorage under mco-status-elements-v1 with a 24 h per-station TTL, so a reload paints Health from cache immediately. Clear that key (or the site's storage) to force a refetch. Stations whose list fails to load are counted as operational when fresh and called out in the panel footer.
All API reads go to mesonet2.climate.umt.edu (the page CSP's connect-src pins that host). The per-station dashboard link stays on mesonet.climate.umt.edu/dash/.
The latest endpoint is polled every 5 minutes. Each response is merged into our in-memory store rather than replacing it — the Mesonet API occasionally drops a (different) station per call, and merging keeps a station's last-known timestamp from flickering to "no record" between polls. If a station genuinely stops reporting, its timestamp just ages naturally into the very-stale bin. Dot colors are also refreshed every 30 seconds against the local clock so freshness stays current between API calls.
Static overlay GeoJSON files in data/ (state, reservations, counties) are built by data.R from tigris + rmapshaper and checked into the repo so the app has zero runtime dependencies beyond the Mesonet API.
Development
The app is a single static index.html with no build step. Serve it locally with any static server:
# Python
python -m http.server 8000
# Node
npx serve .
Open http://localhost:8000.
Deployment
Published via GitHub Pages from the main branch. To enable for a fresh fork:
- Push to
main.
- Repo → Settings → Pages → Build and deployment → Source: Deploy from a branch, Branch: main / (root).
- Site goes live at
https://<owner>.github.io/mesonet-status/ within a minute or two. Add a CNAME file later if you want a custom subdomain.
Social preview image
.github/workflows/preview.yml runs nightly (and on manual dispatch) and commits assets/og-card.png back to main — always pull/rebase before pushing, or you race it.
scripts/generate_preview.py screenshots the live Pages site at 2400×1260 (a 1200×630 viewport at 2×) with ?mode=status, which pins the Status view and, as a deep link, keeps the first-visit help dialog closed. It waits for the #refresh-stamp text to read refreshed … and then 4 seconds for tiles to paint — that param, element id and stamp text are a contract with the script. Run it locally to check:
pip install playwright
playwright install --with-deps chromium
python scripts/generate_preview.py
Tooling
- MapLibre GL JS v6.11.2 via CDN (imported by mco-web-style's
MCO.map.loadMapLibre(); SRI in the import map).
- mco-web-style 0.16.2 (pinned + SRI).
- CARTO Basemaps Positron + Dark Matter (neutral data-vis backdrops, free, no API key).
- Vanilla JS / HTML / CSS — no bundler, no framework.
License
MIT — Copyright (c) 2026–present Montana Climate Office
