[Xastir] NEXRAD decoder?

[Tyler Allison]

> I do create a rectilinear (non-projected flat product for the
> NM/Texas/OK area, as well as a US product.  Both of these can be
> obtained via HTTP, and are NEXRAD Level III composites.
>
> Take a look at http://page4.tamu.edu/USrad.geo for the US product geo,
> which will work with xastir.

Your work is what gave me the idea. Im only interested in a specific radar
location so downloading a 200k+ image to grab a very small piece to
display in Xastir seems overkill (it also takes about 5min to load it on
my old laptop)

>
> It's not unreasonable for me to consider additional products if folks
> have specific areas they want/need...

Of course Im specifically interested in the tri-state area (for me that
means Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio) but that wont help the next guy who wants
what I want ;)

> I'm considering gridding the
> conterminus US into 6-8 sections with some overlap and doing products on
> those on a 6 min. basis.  Mostly depends on server load.

Well that's the thing. I have a spare PC in my basement ;) If I can grab
the data myself via the Internet Im willing to burn the CPU cycles for my
location.

One of the pieces of 'NOAA' data the 'public' does not have access to is
the radar data.  I've written an OpenSource web based system that can take
the 'raw' NOAA EMWIN products and turn it into something useful for the
non-scientific folks interested in weather.  However, the radar data is
unavailable to us joe public in a non-mangled way.  (eg: I want the radar
image without the county outlines, logos, etc)

>
> I use a package called GEMPAK written by the UCAR Unidata program.


Yeah. I saw that and thought about trying to use it but it looks like
WAAAAY more than I want and the online documentation is horrible.  And
being joe-public Im specifically except from support. Maybe there is a
specific binary inside the GEMPAX mega software that will do what Im
asking?

I simply want to grab the latest LEVEL III product via ftp, for a specific
radar location, push it through a C or perl script and have a jpg/png/gif
come out the other side. (http://www.nws.noaa.gov/tg/rpccds.html)

If I can figure out how to do that I can add it to the www.noahweather.org
open source project.

> If you're looking for a project, the Level II data is coming on-line and
> a powerful contribution to the community could be made by someone
> looking to develop new code to work with that.

Im not an .edu or a scientist. Just a citizen interested in weather stuff
without disposable cash for a $1k a month T1 ;)

-Tyler