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Yessir, maybe even up to New York Area...occasionally get an Atlantic storm up that way.

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Okeydokey - will extend up to NY then. Being a Limey, I'm not too familiar with how far up these hurricanes regularly go - so, if in doubt, my policy is to ask!

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First, I noticed that at some points in time certain sites (Corpus Christi for example) weren't consistent with the other sites. For instance, CC's ground clutter had a totally different return signal strength for ground clutter than the rest. This made CC red while everything else was blue (50db vs 5db return strength via the scale provided). I'm not sure this is a common occurance, but it was annoying nonetheless.

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Yup, I've noticed this myself. That was the main motivation behind me deciding to add in the Legend overlay too - that way, even if the image returned is 'unusual', the user can at least see that the legend is referring to a different range of return strengths, and (hopefully) apply logic thereafter to what they are seeing. No guarantee, of course, but it's what the NWS themselves do (and if it's good enough for them...)

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Along the same lines, the ground clutter from these sites is excessive isn't it? Now for me, and probably a lot of you that understand radar this isn't a problem, but for the layperson that is looking at the overlay and doesn't understand how radar works I can imagine them thinking that it's wrong, or broken, or just stupid. I mean if a normal user that expects to turn on the radar layer and expects to see only weather, turns it on and the coast lights up like a Christmas tree.....they may get turned off and/or confused by it. This is one area where the NSSL and other radar images that are somewhat post-processed are better. Again, maybe being too picky, but just trying to convey the point. This also may be the best we can do, and that's fine also......I guess I just don't know for sure and so would raise the question.

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I see the problem, but like you, don't have a solution for it. I guess really it just behoves the layperson to WISE UP and take the time to learn something they don't understand. We can do this with maybe judicious use of URLs linking to the 'Idiot's guide to radar-returns' (if there is such a document ) or maybe just the NWS FAQs?

My mission here is "enablement" primarily - giving people who know what they need, the ability to access it via one clean and handy interface in Google Earth. Educating people is a secondary consideration, really - and I expect them to take at least the most-basic steps to further their own learning. In a nutshell, that basically means I think we should give them the pointers, but responsibility for usage and development of their own brains, lies with them.

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Also, from a technical standpoint, this is mostly implemented on top of the .NET framework in C#...only because I'm good at it, and it's super easy to rapidly develop in it. I used a fairly quick and dirty approach to the code because I basically started this while storm season was in full swing. I need to spend an entire weekend going back and cleaning up the code before I let anyone see it. Kinda like cleaning up the house before company arrives lol.

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LOL - I know exactly what you mean (especially having spent time this morning doing exactly that myself, in terms of tidying up the attached KMZ!) Anyway, cool - I may be able to pseudocode the logic for "how to fetch and apply the GIS files", in such a way that when you rebuild it in .NET/C# that it's a quick job. We'll see. I really ought to get more involved with .NET.... I've tended to shun it, because it looks like M$ hold all my code remotely by the short-and-curlies, and I'm not 100% sure I like that. But I've probably got the wrong end of the stick... it wouldn't be the first time

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Hopefully as the GE Client API evolves, and more data becomes available from people who see the benefit of making it geo-friendly, we can shine this link up to something much better than it is now.

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Sure we can! It's pretty darned useful already, and looks good, and it's a credit to you and the other folks who have submitted stuff for inclusion. On a personal level, it provided a HUGELY exciting and entertaining insight into Rita's visitation, which is not something I would normally expect to see so clearly, from this far off, UK-based perspective. It struck me then how seriously useful this tool could be, for folks that (unlike me) weren't necessarily sitting in their comfortable living-rooms looking at drama vicariously unfolding thousands of safety-giving miles away, and who actually NEEDED to know this stuff, and NOW, so they could call up Mom to tell her when to get out. It's quite humbling, really.

This was backed up a bit when I found myself on the www.hurricanecity.com website watching a RealAudio live stream coming from somewhere in that area. Not only did it heighten the drama, and the sense of the scope of this ordeal, the guy running the show happened to use the old Keyhole program at one point, and brought up some very basic views of certain towns he thought would be most affected. Meanwhile, he was having to switch between programs and clumsily try and compare those maps, with the radar maps he had available in a different, NWS-specific program. I thought to myself... "How come he hasn't got Paul's overlay, and why isn't he using Google Earth?" Maybe next time, he will - and people may benefit from it, as a result?


Anyway - enough of my blather.... attached is ONE example NWS RIDGE radar set up as I envisage all the others would be. It features Brownsville, Texas, and all the products associated therein.

Points to note...
1 - you can probably tell just from this, why I think there are risks in providing TOO many radar folders in one package. There's just too much likelihood of someone ticking the top-folder, and selecting EVERYTHING for display, which would be as pointless as it is stupid, but GE's system currently doesn't enable me to prevent it. I do hope they change this in time.

2 - Brownsville's Velocity maps (at the time of writing) are currently not displaying transparency on their backgrounds. This is a fault their end - it's doing it on the NWS official site, too. Dunno why - maybe it'll fix itself again later - but the important thing is, it's not the KML at fault here - it's the returned image itself. [EDIT: This problem appears to have gone away now...]

3 - There are currently no warnings in force, so you can't see anything when you click this layer. In normal circumstances, if there WAS a warning, you'd see what the zoned areas meant, by looking at any of the Legends for any of the sub-products. They all carry that (even if they are different for the radar-return types and scales, on a per-product basis).

4 - GFW/GIS geo-location data being used for this current set, is the same as I was using a couple of days ago, in my own tests. It was calibrated perfectly then, but I have NOT checked today to see if the GFW data is different this time. I will be doing so later, and trying (again) to work out how pdchawaii's numbers became different, if it turns out the GFW has remained static all this time. This is the one area which worries me, slightly - but like I said, I know the algorithm to make it work - I just wish I could make it client-side, rather than have to force you or me to run a separate server just to calculate this 'munge' on each 5-minute fetch. Give us variables, GE, please [EDIT: I have now checked... Bad news.. The BRO GIS data for the N0R coefficients is different today than it was at the weekend. Darn. This means that the GFW files really DO need to be collected and parsed on EVERY fetch of the radar-image. I'll go write that code now!]

Any comments, feedback greatly appreciated. If you think it needs a different organisational approach, please let me know, and I'll start thinking - but this seems to me the most complete and accessible approach, given the limitations of GE. I'm open to ideas, though!

Note - I will probably remove this KMZ fairly shortly after I know you've received it, Paul. Sorry everyone else - you will get to see it in the long-run... but we want it to be right, and (most-especially) I couldn't live with myself if I 'killed' the NWS servers by releasing the full KMZ in haste. Please bear with us! Thanks...[EDIT: The KMZ has been removed now - updated & improved version for testing is posted later in this thread]

Edited by BigJacko (09/27/05 02:31 PM)

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