Re: hurricane hunters - new show on twc
Posted by
Chris in Tampa on 6/12/2012, 8:46 pm
I never thought about the birds, oil platforms, or helicopters flying to and from the oil platforms. Low level missions can be very dangerous because if something goes wrong and you lose altitude you have pretty much no time to correct. (So you really need to avoid any thunderstorms in an invest as any microburst could down a plane before there was any time to try to recover.) I can see why there are no low level missions at night.
No 3-D for my mapping. The best way to view my recon tracks in Google Earth is looking straight down with an orientation to the north. Google Earth changed the way icons are displayed. They are no longer flat against the Earth, which might be great for some things, but does not work for my product. If you tilt the Google Earth view the barbs flip around to other directions, which then show the wrong wind directions, and they also appear above the surface of the Earth when you have the view tilted, which also messes up the wind barbs. The wind barbs need to be flat against the Earth, yet must always be about the same size so that you can view them from high up. (so I can't make them an overlay in Google Earth either)
Hopefully by 2013 I will have a product in Google Maps that works like Google Earth used to. The barbs would be flat against the Earth and would not change directions since it would always be in 2D oriented north. I did create something like that at the end of last year but I still need to do a lot of work on it yet.
A few days ago I did have an idea for something in 3D for my recon system. I was thinking about having another product that instead of having icons, would have rectangles extrude from the Earth's surface depending on the wind speed. 1 mph would be represented by a rectangle extruding maybe 1,000 feet above the surface of the Earth. 100 mph, maybe a rectangle 100,000 feet high. Then, you would use 3D to determine where the highest wind was. The entire recon path would be made up of these rectangles so that when you tilted the Google Earth view you could see where the winds were highest visually. You could display perhaps an entire slice of the storm from the entry into one quadrant through to the exit of the other quadrant and display just that part, meaning you would have a wind profile from the outer band through the eye and to the opposite outer band. I'll probably do that at some point. |
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