[Xastir-Dev] US radar composite available

[Gerry Creager N5JXS]

I've started making the US NEXRAD radar composites available.  These are 
updated on a 12 minute basis, and may be accessed via 
ftp://page4.tamu.edu/pub/radar/

The .geo file I'm recommending is USrad.geo and is in that directory. 
The image you'll use is ftp://page4.tamu.edu/pub/radar/USrad.png

Currently, the background is black and I'm not going to have enough time 
to learn enough ImageMagick to see if we can make it transparent. 
There're others on this list who are more conversant with the program 
than I, who might be able to help there.  I suspect it's possible to add 
an 'offsite 0 0 0' command, if we've implemented it (that's the command 
in MapServer and that's also using ImageMagick, but then again, they 
also use gdal).

The data are derived from the National Weather Service's WSR-88D doppler 
data and are received via the Unidata Local Data Manager (LDM).  They 
are processed to images using Unidata's Gempak utilities.

Soon as I figure out what happened last time I tried this, I'll move 
image generation up to 5-min refresh.  For WSR-88D that's pretty timely.

Somewhere down the pike I'll have the capabilities to process the 
real-time data and will make real-time NEXRAD available.  Likely that's 
a next-summer project.

Please test and send comments.  I'm planning to implement some other 
areas of the Country (NW, SW, N Plains, Cent. Plains, S. Plains, NE, SE) 
as time permits and will publish that info to the APRS sig and the 
xastir list.

FWIW, use of this will help my project in lean budget times...

73, gerry
-- 
Gerry Creager -- gerry.creager at tamu.edu
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University	
Cell: 979.229.5301 Office: 979.458.4020 FAX: 979.847.8578
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