hacking gempak NAWIPS

[tom hanlon]

I have set up Gempak/Nawips on my RedHat linux server.

I am not attending a university I am just doing this on my own so I can mess with some of the models myself. Gathering data will therefore have to be done by a series of ftp scripts. I do not think I can set up the ldm because the data sources require University membership?? Correct me if I am wrong and I will go ahead and try and setup LDM.

So I connect to ftpprd.ncep.noaa.gov/pub/data/nccf/com/nawips/prod and from there I can grab the latest ETA forecasts along with the other models and run nsharp to produce skew-t's and run garp for maps and some other products.

So far it is pretty cool.

Has anyone out there done this recently ? A nice goal would be to tie it into my webserver so I could produce my own graphics from the model data and access them on the road. It would also be nice to capture images from a day's chasing. Satellite, radar, etc.

Does anyone have any tips on the following?
Fast sources for data, this data should be mirrored in a number of locations. Are they publicly accessable? Where is a list ?

Gempak is fairly obtuse to a newbie, the gui's GARP and NSHARP make a fair amount of sense. Is there a good manual, book or other documentation ?

I am a web developer so building a web interface to some of the tools would be nice. Anyone been there or done that ?

Is the best source of info the mailing lists at unidata?? How many folks use this program?

A long term goal might be to use maps generated in a GIS tool such as mapserver to integrate with the weather output from Gempak/NAWIPS..
Anyone done that already ?

So far the main hurdle has been trying to sort this collection of tools out. No documentation leads to looking at the executables and trying them one by one. Once I hit Garp and NSHARP things started to come together. Then figuring out where to store the data was the second hurdle .

Pretty cool, I am new to meteorology so all these tools are new to me.

WHERE IS THE MANUAL ??
Is any training available ?
Thanks.

 

[Robert Dewey]

There is a good tutorial here: http://my.unidata.ucar.edu/content/softwar...rial/index.html

And here are the man pages: http://my.unidata.ucar.edu/content/softwar...nual/index.html

As far as the LDM... You MUST have a static IP address for it to work. You must also have access to port 388 (if on a firewall port forewarding would work). Another thing to think about is your bandwidth. I have a dedicated server which runs the LDM with several local universities on a 4Mbps connection, and still have latency problems with some of the data feeds - particularly the model data. If you have the LDM setup, the next thing to do is contact some local universities to see if they will give you access to their stream of NOAAport data. They may ask you to write a brief summary of what you plan to do with the data/how it will be used/etc.. Unidata will not directly help you in this aspect, since they mainly devote their time to helping out universities and not individuals. The good thing about the LDM, is it works right out of the box with GEMPAK, so you don't have to change any data locations or config files to locate the data (if installed exactly as shown on the Unidata "LDM install" page)...

 

[rdale]

"WHERE IS THE MANUAL ??"

It's installed in the 'docs' directory... Also each application has a lengthy help section if you click HELP.

- Rob