Weather Graphics newsletter
tim.v...@gmail.com
NEWSLETTER #1 (ONE!)
OCTOBER 3, 2006
Tim Vasquez
Welcome to the Weather Graphics newsletter, sent to you from
beneath the big subtropical ridge in east Texas! Interestingly
I've been taking signups since 2003 but have simply not sat down
and written up anything. I'll try to send one of these out
every month or two depending on the interest.
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1. INSIDER DIGITAL ATMOSPHERE NEWS
Some of you may have noticed the pause in Digital Atmosphere
progress since early July. From about that time until the
last half of September, I was tied up day and night on the
brand new Forecasting Red Book project -- which you can see at:
http://www.weathergraphics.com/redbook
Currently I'm catching up on a multitude of loose ends, the
inevitable result of working on a 300-page book, and I expect
to start programming work again this month.
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2. ALL SOFTWARE AT 25% OFF!
As a way of thanking you for your patronage, I'm running a
special sale until the 10th, NOT advertised on our website!
Load up your Weather Graphics shopping cart with at least
$200 worth of software items and get it at 25% off!
We have never run a deal like this in our 15 year history. To
get in on the discount, simply enter voucher code 411061501
when you check out with your shopping cart. It's a great chance
to stock up on our Archives datasets, get Forecast Laboratory
or a Digital Atmosphere upgrade, get some Christmas shopping
done, or just save money for the agency or department.
Offer expires October 10, cannot be used by new customers,
and CANNOT be applied retroactively to orders already placed.
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3. WHAT ITEMS ARE NEW THIS YEAR?
Forecast Laboratory - released FEBRUARY 15, 2006
http://www.weathergraphics.com/lab/
Weather Forecasting Red Book - released OCTOBER 4, 2006
http://www.weathergraphics.com/redbook
2005 Archive sets - released JANUARY 15, 2006
http://www.weathergraphics.com/archive/
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4. COOL TIPS: HISTORICAL RADAR DATA!
Imagine being able to go back and look at any storm situation in the
U.S. since the mid 1990s, in high-res NEXRAD format. Well, you can!
The National Climatic Data Center maintains all historical NEXRAD
data in a 500 terabyte archive, served by a IBM Magstar 3590 robotics
tape library.
The only downside is that the files can be anywhere from 10 MB to 60 MB
in size, and you need a program that can decompress gzip (WinRAR from
rarlabs.com is pretty good). Since Digital Atmosphere does not handle
gzip you have to do this decompression first.
(1) Simply point your browser here:
http://hurricane.ncdc.noaa.gov/pls/plhas/HAS.FileAppSelect?datasetname=7000
(2) Choose your station, and pick a start date and end date (in UTC)...
you should make these two dates the same as otherwise you will get
far too much data.
(3) After entering your E-mail address and hitting "Continue" you will
be taken to a secondary page to get more info on your choices. It's
best to leave "UnTar Files" as "no" and select only the file that
you need.
(4) You will get a message like
"Your HAS data request: HAS000483886 has been submitted for Normal
processing."
At this point the robotic system is retrieving the optical discs and
loading the data you need)... this could take minutes or, on rare
occasion, hours.
(5) When you're notified it's ready, download the data from the URL
shown
in your E-mail (where it says "go to the following URL). You can
either right-click and save it to your hard drive for a full
examination,
or if you just want to open everything, click directly on the file
and
your browser should call the decompressor to handle it.
(6) Once you open the archives you will see a list of possibly 20,000
files.
The filenames look like this.
KFWS_SDUS54_N0RFWS_199505051631
The only important parts here are KFWS (the radar site), N0R (in this
case, the product type), and 199505051631 (the date and time, which
in
this case is 1995 May 05, 1631 UTC). It is these files that Digital
Atmosphere can ingest.
There a lot of different types here that you'll never use. The most
important product types are N0R (base reflectivity), N0S (storm
relative
velocity), N0V (base velocity), N1P (1-hr precip), NCR (composite
reflectivity), NTP (storm total precip), N0Z (248 nm base
reflectivity).
TIP: If you sort the files by name, they will also get
sorted by product type.
(7) Extract the files you want where Digital Atmosphere can easily find
them. Then in Digital Atmosphere use Radar > Load Radar Data From
File...
to import the product you want to see. It will appear automatically
(make sure your map is centered on the correct area already).
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5. COOL TIPS: THE LATEST FORECASTING PAPERS!
Did you know that you can get the entire collection of American
Meteorological Society journal articles from the 19th century
to 2000 free of charge? We can probably attribute this to
the AMS working with a good publisher like Allen Press, a
very lucky situation... try Googling "Elsevier" and "expensive"
and you'll see the kind of situation being fought by less
fortunate organizations.
Just go here to search:
http://ams.allenpress.com/amsonline/?request=search-simple
Or go here to browse issues:
http://ams.allenpress.com/amsonline/?request=get-archive
I strongly recommend the "Weather & Forecasting" journal, which
has the greatest number of articles applicable to operational
forecasting. "Monthly Weather Review" and "Bulletin of the
American Meteorological Society" place second and third. With
the rest of them, you'll probably be getting a lot of obscure
articles about models and physics.
Though there are expensive charges for recent journal copies,
the back issues are a fantastic resource and is a resounding
demonstration of the AMS's commitment to education.
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6. COOL TIPS: EARTHQUAKE ALERTS!
OK, so it's not weather, but who wouldn't love to be updated on
the latest earthquakes via E-mail using any tailored triggers
of magnitude and location? Visit here and set up a profile!
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/ens/
Mine is set for Magnitude 7 anywhere in the world. It's not
only fun but if you live in a coastal area you can be the
first to have a heads up on any possible tsunami before the
warnings even come out. What a great service from the U.S.
Geological Service.
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7. JOKE
I might as well go out on a bang and leave you with a good
science joke:
A Mathematician, a Biologist and a Physicist are sitting in a
street cafe watching people going in and coming out of the house
on the other side of the street.
First they see two people going into the house. Time passes.
After a while they notice three persons coming out of the
house.
The Physicist: "The measurement wasn't accurate.".
The Biologist's conclusion: "They have reproduced".
The Mathematician: "If now exactly 1 person enters the house
then it will be empty again!"
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Well, that's about it for this installment... take care!
Tim Vasquez