| Someone emailed me a question about the NOAA P-3 radar imagery that my recon system used to have. I thought I would post the response here too. I still don't get that data, but occasionally I might be able to find some screenshots on NOAA's site to post. Nothing on Isaias yet. Here is the video I talk about down below. Unfortunately, NOAA P-3 radar data is no longer available on the site. The data I used to get was in a format my site could interpret, with actual imagery within a Google Earth .kmz file. After they changed the radar equipment, the data is now only available in a format I don't know how to process. (CFRadial) While they had intended to possibly add the format I used to use back, I still don't see it available yet. I tried again last night to download various programs to try to read the CFRadial format, but I can't even get the files to open on my own computer. I definitely know I wouldn't be able to have the data in real time on my site because I wouldn't be able to install the necessary programs. I was hoping I could at least decode the files so that I could occasionally add imagery, but I just can't figure it out. Too many of the programs need to use Java, which I consider too insecure to use, and the ones I found that didn't use that I couldn't get to work. I'm just too unfamiliar with the programming language I tried to get to read the data, Python (https://www.python.org/), and the file format. If I don't see the format I used to be able to use by next year, I'll ask them about it again. I don't want to keep bothering them about it. I think they are still testing it all. The data still resides in a folder marked with the name "testing" in part of the folder name. This year more things are available. This year, they sometimes have screenshots of the radar data on some missions. (I attached 1 that they had for a Hanna mission in which they had 4 screenshots. http://tropicalatlantic.com/temp/2020/08-01/screenshot.jpg ) Images like that I may eventually post to Twitter sometimes now that I see it. Additionally, on some missions they have video that seems to be simply the display they see. But those files are large and there are many of them. (1 file per 60 seconds of video) That means a huge amount of data to download. One mission into Hanna took 45 minutes for me to download, has 389 files and the size of all of those video files is 8.3 gigabytes. I see files earlier this year that seemed to indicate things were still being tested. There are conversations from last year about various things to include, such as what some variables should be. I actually see reference and code from the programming language I tried, along with one of the software packages. (https://www.anaconda.com/) Maybe I wasn't too far off from finding something that would have worked. But I see questions in some of the documents on their site indicating it might not be as simple as finding a script to process it. And now I found a script on their site that also had another of the exact things I tried. (https://arm-doe.github.io/pyart/) I'll have to think about looking into it again. I already uninstalled everything I had installed. The CFRadial files I can't yet proces contain over 4,000 files in a folder for just one mission. They are not all the same thing, but they are taken every 5 to 6 seconds. That would be too much to process anyway. I would have to pick and choose. I just took a look at more of the files on their site and saw some examples of what I had been trying to work with. I attached two of them too. (1 | 2) I would never be comfortable with trying to determine how that image should be placed in Google Earth. The previous files I got had images like that in them. (one without the scale on the image) However, they were contained within Google Earth .kmz files that had the coordinate bounds of where to place them. It was also something that had been more tested. I looked at some of the video of the radar display. I uploaded the display from mission 6 into Hanna. It records everything they do in the display, including what they type, so I wouldn't want to use that sometimes probably. I went through the one mission I had downloaded for Hanna and removed the first part which had some typing in various windows in which they set things up. You can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2qFZSLAeng I sped it up 128 times normal speed. I won't do that too often. It's a lot of downloading and takes a long time to process that video. I just took a look and the last testing data they had that contained all of what I mentioned above was for Hanna. I don't know for sure that it comes in in real time. The file stamp times reflect when the data was created, but the folders I see were created two days later. That might mean it isn't transferred until later. Though perhaps some data is in real time, I don't know. I will have to check that in the future. It would seem impossible that 8.3 gigabytes of the screenshot data video is relayed in real time from the plane. I will look into the screenshots they sometimes take and see if that comes in in real time. If so, I might add it to Twitter when I see it. Eventually I might add it into the recon system too in some way, but that might be quite awhile before I got to implementing something like that. I might actually add those screenshots into this folder: http://tropicalatlantic.com/noaa-aoc/images.shtml Manually at times. It would be a little complicated, though something I could do, to download that data automatically. The folder structure on their site for this data seems to be consistent lately, though earlier on the data was organized with other named folders. I would need to know the folder structure is always the same because I can't simply download all the data in a folder. It is massive. I would need to always know where the screenshots are within the folder structure for each mission. I'll see when the data is added, if it is, for the current NOAA P-3 missions for Isaias to see if that data comes in in real time and then think about adding radar data into that section automatically or not. I might not. It might be best to not do it in real time now that I think about it. They could accidentally take a screenshot so I might want to review it all first. I will download the screenshots from the past two years and will likely add them in the next day or two to that folder. |