Thanks to both of you for an EXCELLENT submission - this is a really fascinating tool, and I've been transfixed by it for days now... it's rapidly forming part of my life!
Having said that, being a 'never-satisfied' geek, I delved deeper into the 'Rita Radar' package that pdchawaii kindly donated to pseabury's project, and found a few things which caused me to raise an eyebrow.
It seemed to me that the coordinates of the LatLonBox on the overlay were very slightly 'off', when I compared them with current images.
Specifically, I went into the data at the NWS site (where the images are fetched from, on the RIDGE Radar experimental pages), and found that alongside each radar image, there is a corresponding GFW file, which denotes the bounding box for EACH separate picture. I have been looking carefully to see if these are changing much - and it doesn't appear that they have... but certainly, when I calculated the exact viewport positions, the numbers I got for some radar-sites where very slightly different to those already stored in pdchawaii's overlays. This made me wonder if some of them have changed in the intervening days, as radars are 'boosted' or otherwise tweaked, and thus the resulting image coefficients change when the final picture is 'squeezed' into a standard 600x550 pixel image.
What assumptions (if any) did you make, with regard to the GFW files, pdchawaii? Do you know if these change? And what was your approach to calculating the LatLonBox from these files? I have a slight feeling you may have applied the 600 and 550 multipliers to the wrong coordinate, possibly (either that, or the radar datasets DID change at some point recently).
Aside from all this, I have begun the process of creating an overlay set for ALL the RIDGE Radar sites, and for ALL their data products (they deliver seven: 3 types of reflectivity, 2 wind overlays and 2 for rainfall, plus a warning layer, and legends for all seven). So far, it's going very well, and I have developed a reasonably sensible set of sub-folders per site and type. My only worry at this point, is it is possible to unwittingly turn them ALL on at once, which would put massive load on the NWS servers, I reckon... (potentially 2325 refreshes per 5 mins!!!!) so I am trying to find ways to limit this possibility (ie, have one radar and only one product-type displayed at once, maybe).
And of course, the other concern is how best to 'scrape' the GIS positioning data from the GFW file on each refresh (if it turns out this is necessary - certainly NWS advise it), so that the overlay is correctly stretched over Google Earth. At the moment, KML doesn't allow this to be done in-situ on the client-side, and I thought it would be pointless me writing my own server-code to do this, if, ultimately, the end-result might be re-incorporated back into pseabury's package which is tied to his own server already (I know that is perhaps presumptive, but I'm sure once Rita is fully passed, we'll need these radar stations again, and perhaps having all data accessible from all the nearby sites on the coast will be useful - I just thought I'd save someone a job, and get the ball rolling).
Previous
Index
Next
Flat
Re: Rita Live Radar
Edit
Reply
Quote
