Re: there has been chatter on our local board about it also
Posted by Chris in Tampa on 8/15/2019, 9:10 pm
A new radar site would be great. While they have GIF loops, their other loops require Adobe Flash which is going away in 2020. Already Chrome has a message that allows people to disable Flash now. That's one of the projects I have to get done, switching all my Flash charts to JavaScript charts.

I hope they still have imagery that isn't on a dynamic map too. Sometimes I like looing at a dynamic map you can zoom in on, but a lot of times I want a single site image too.

I like Weather Underground's site more for radar, but their site increasingly disappoints me. It's gotten worse and worse. For me, most of the time zooming in on an area no longer works. Sometimes I can get it to work. Tampa for example:
https://www.wunderground.com/radar/us/fl/tampa/tbw

And of course they have the Wundermap too which is dynamic.

Old GFS is still available on Tropical Tidbits:
https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/analysis/models/?model=gfs-legacy&region=atl&pkg=mslp_uv850

And here is the current, newer, GFS:
https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/analysis/models/?model=gfs&region=atl&pkg=mslp_uv850

I haven't taken a close enough look to see how they differ. When we start getting later into the season I will see how they differ on some of the more powerful tropical systems. I don't really look at the models for other weather. I've heard how the newer GFS doesn't handle snow as well. Not sure about other drawbacks.



Karen, you mentioned losing links. If you need satellite links, I recently updated my satellite page:
http://tropicalatlantic.com/satellite/

One link I haven't posted before is for satellite data over Africa. EUMETSAT has a viewer, which I assume might be somewhat new:
https://eumetview.eumetsat.int/mapviewer/

I also took that satellite imagery and added it to a Google Earth file that I added to my site called "EUMETSAT Overlays for Google Earth", which opens in the program Google Earth.

A lot of the other pages of links on my site are somewhat outdated. I work on tropical projects full time, but still haven't had time to get to the rest of the site's links.

Speaking of radar data, I have added more and more radar data to my radar page for international sites:
http://tropicalatlantic.com/radars/
That has been a major project that involves verifying the location of every single radar site that has public imagery by using satellite imagery. (and researching it through other means, which means having to use Google Translate a lot for non-English speaking countries) I completed Thailand about a week ago and added some more for Argentina. Most of Asia to Eastern Europe also isn't done. I'm upgrading some maps from Google to ArcGis, another mapping product, at the moment before getting deeper into updating some of the code of my model system.

By next year I might have best track and model data worldwide using data from the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC).

For places other than the Atlantic, East Pacific and Central Pacific, I would use this file to see what is active:
https://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/atcf_web/docs/current_storms/storms.jtwc_atcfp2

And then download best track and model files from here (big directory listing):
https://www.ssd.noaa.gov/PS/TROP/DATA/ATCF/JTWC/

ATCF best track and model files on the Navy's server are not accessible, only the storm file:
https://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/atcf_web/docs/current_storms/
But I finally found that NOAA site which does make that data available.

But still nothing I see that shows what the NHC is watching before it is an invest.



On another topic, something I saw posted elsewhere was an article about a 2018 study, "Have We Reached the Limits of Predictability for Tropical Cyclone Track Forecasting?".

Article:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/08/hurricane-forecasters-may-be-reaching-the-limits-of-predictability/

Study:
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/BAMS-D-17-0136.1

They still have work to do on intensity, and they'll always try to do better on the track too, but tracks errors will never be 0, so at some point there won't be much improvement to be made on track forecasts.
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Advice and question regarding next week (Aug 19 on) - karen, 8/14/2019, 8:04 pm
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