Dewedda.com – A weather side project for where I live
I’ve been spending the past month or so working on a hobby project I started last year, a weather and hurricane tracking site built for the Eastern Caribbean. I figured it was worth sharing here since it’s a full-stack project running on a Linux/PHP stack.
What is it?
Dewedda.com is a hurricane tracking and weather website built for the Eastern Caribbean islands — Antigua & Barbuda, Barbados, St. Kitts & Nevis, St. Lucia, Dominica, Grenada, and the rest of the island chain.
I’ve always been fascinated by weather, something I got from my father. Friends and family used to call him during hurricane season asking the same questions: is this storm going to hit us, how strong, and when?
After he passed, those calls started coming to me. That’s really what led to building the site. It started as a way to gather information and run the calculations for myself in real time without doing it all manually.
The homepage shows the latest GOES-19 satellite imagery, active storm alerts (or the all-clear), and links to the main tools. During hurricane season, this is where active storms would appear with distance calculations to each island.
The problem it solves
During hurricane season, the TV (Weather Channel, Accuweather Channel, etc.) and online weather coverage websites tend to focus on the US mainland and its territories. The smaller Eastern Caribbean islands often get less coverage and infrequent answers to: How close will it get to my island? How strong will it be? And when will it arrive?
Weather sites that do cover our region tend to fall into two camps: either they’re broad global platforms where the Caribbean is an afterthought, or they’re specialist tools built for meteorologists, packed with charts, model data, and terminology that most people don’t want or care to understand. If you’re just a regular person on one of these islands trying to figure out whether you should be concerned about an approaching system, neither extreme is great.
Dewedda.com tries to find the middle ground: enough depth to be genuinely useful without the information overload that makes it feel like a second job just to check the weather. The core questions are simple: what’s happening now, is anything coming, and when and how close will it get? The site is built around answering those first, with more detail available if you want to dig deeper.
Each island shows live conditions at a glance: temperature, sky conditions, wind speed and direction. You can pin up to 3 favorite islands to the top of the list. Click any island for the full detail page.
Individual island pages show current conditions, 8-day forecast, and historical weather charts with trend data. You can switch between islands using a dropdown or overlay a second island’s data on the charts for comparison.
The interactive map (Leaflet + OpenStreetMap) plots all 14 islands and, during an active storm, renders NHC forecast tracks with wind radii visualization. You can toggle layers, view favorites only, and click any island for coordinates and quick links.
The outlook page pulls in satellite imagery from multiple sources (GOES-19, NASA MSFC), the Antigua & Barbuda Met Office regional forecast, NHC tropical weather discussions, sea surface temperatures, and Caribbean wind forecasts, all in one place.
The history section archives past storms with classification badges, maximum intensity, and the closest point of approach (CPA) to each island. Useful for looking back at how close a system actually came.
Tech stack
- Backend: PHP, MySQL.
- Frontend: Apache via Cloudflare, responsive dark theme.
- Data sources: NHC, OpenWeather, NOAA, NASA MSFC, Antigua Met Office.
- Maps: Leaflet.js with Rainviewer API.
- Hosting: Stacklinux.com VPS with staging environment, GitHub deployment/workflow.
In closing
Started the website in August 2025. Here’s the full changelog. The site is production-ready ahead of the June 1st hurricane season. Hoping for a quiet year, but the website is in place for real-time storm monitoring and email alerts if needed. Hopefully it’s used.
Check it out at dewedda.com. It’s open to anyone, but if you’re from the Caribbean or know people there, I’d especially appreciate a look and any thoughts.