New Forecast Soundings Online - SHARPpy

[Kelton Halbert]

I'm not going to rewrite degrib from scratch because I've got other stuff I'd rather work on, but if I see a way to speed up SHARPpy I can submit a pull request nice and simple.

And this is exactly what we'd love to see happen. I know it's hard to get people on the code contribution bandwagon, but this is the hope and dream once the open source release happens.

Also, I'd love some input on what people would find intuitive for a user interface when selecting observed/model soundings from a GUI. I've attached an image from the current working version of the sounding selection system. Obviously this is intuitive to me (I mean, I wrote it), but that doesn't mean that this is intuitive to everyone else. I want this to be easy to use (unlike BUFKIT...). Ideas?

 

[rdale]

Finally took some time to install this so 1) very happy I did! and 2) sorry if I've revived a dead thread

1) Any more info on the Storm Slinky? Or a "full" documentation site?
2) Using Windows, sometimes when I use the scroll wheel to zoom it goes where I'm pointing, and sometimes (most) it just zooms towards right-middle side of the display. Just me?
3) Select map area shows a bunch of maps, but nothing happens when I select one.
4) If I select a model and select all forecast hours, the button at the bottom correctly changes to "Deselect All". If I change models, the "deselect all" button stays but nothing is selected so it doesn't do anything.
5) In the SREF, what is the "main" line depicting? I thought it was the mean, but it displays well outside of the members frequently.
6) Observed: Are non 00/12Z launches captured in the "latest"?

 

[Drew Terril]

Apparently I have been living under a rock. This is fantastic. Out of curiousity, how do we go about finding the desktop program for a linux based system. Not entirely sure exactly what to type in on my command prompt window after the usual commands to install a program (command prompt is the only way I install on my machine anymore).

 

[Tim Supinie]

Finally took some time to install this so 1) very happy I did! and 2) sorry if I've revived a dead thread

1) Any more info on the Storm Slinky? Or a "full" documentation site?
2) Using Windows, sometimes when I use the scroll wheel to zoom it goes where I'm pointing, and sometimes (most) it just zooms towards right-middle side of the display. Just me?
3) Select map area shows a bunch of maps, but nothing happens when I select one.
4) If I select a model and select all forecast hours, the button at the bottom correctly changes to "Deselect All". If I change models, the "deselect all" button stays but nothing is selected so it doesn't do anything.
5) In the SREF, what is the "main" line depicting? I thought it was the mean, but it displays well outside of the members frequently.
6) Observed: Are non 00/12Z launches captured in the "latest"?

#1: Last I heard, Greg was still working on the full documentation, but I haven't heard the status of that in quite some time.
#2: The zooming on the Skew-T currently needs some work. I've got an idea for how to make it better, but I'm currently working on re-designing the profile picker, and my effort will be directed there for the mean time.
#3: Yeah, that's not implemented (Kelton put a lot of things in there as placeholders for future ideas). It might show up in a modified form in the re-designed picker.
#4: Hmm, so it does. I might have to patch that.
#5: The program pulls from the Penn State Bufkit archive for the model soundings, and the solid line for the SREF is what is listed as the ensemble mean in that Bufkit file. I have seen it outside the members on one occasion, and that was an issue with the file pulled from the Bufkit archive.
#6: It looks like the "Latest" option does pull from the non-synoptic-hour launches.

 

[rdale]

Thanks for the details! (And I can't believe this is open source / free!!!)

I'll play around with #5 doing some comparisons with BUFKIT to see if that can help. Also might consider keeping an alternate source of BUFR data like http://www.meteor.iastate.edu/~ckarsten/bufkit/data/nam/nam_vih.buf in the mix in case PSU goes down temporarily?

Suggestion: Either "play/pause" keypress, or the ability to hold the cursor <> buttons and let it keep moving? Holding doesn't do anything different than a single press.

 

[Tim Supinie]

Okay, I've submitted a pull request with that patch in it.

A part of the re-designed profile picker will include much more flexibility with data sources, so I'll definitely keep the Iowa State link in mind as another potential source. Thanks!

Hmm, Greg, Kelton, and I are all on OS X, which will flip through them if you hold down an arrow key. I guess it's different between OSes, so it might be a good idea to force it to flip through them somehow.

I'm glad you're enjoying it, but I've only been heavily involved for the last month or so; I can't speak for Greg and Kelton, who've been working on it much longer. I imagine they'll be glad too, though!

 

[rdale]

Thanks - I just got the note from Git. One suggestion - if I don't click "Latest" on the obs it will give me an error code. Can it just default to latest without needing to click?

More on the <> -- if I hold it does two slides. When I let go, it's at some far distant graphic. For example, on GFS, my first button hold shows me F03 and F06. When I let up, it's at F081. I repeat going backwards and it goes to F78 and F75, and then on release I'm at F141.

For the "would be nice" request list, it'd be nice if I could set a default for the obs, and another for the models. I'm primarily always starting with the same (DTX/LAN) so it'd avoid map scrolling and picking.

And not that it was hard to do - but I'll probably put together a video walking through the setup for Windows users this week.

 

[rdale]

Any pointers for intro to Python that would apply here? Any chance of requesting "day of week" shows up in the timestamp up top for forecast models?

And I don't see that bug #4 was fixed.

 

[Andy Berrington]

And not that it was hard to do - but I'll probably put together a video walking through the setup for Windows users this week.

This is a good idea, in addition to one for OS X users.

I hit a few snags in the setup personally, so I haven't been able to get it running yet.

 

[Greg Blumberg]

Let me try to answer several posts at one time. Tim was right, I am thrilled that everyone is enjoying this.

Rob Dale,

Much of what you suggested regarding the "latest" and default observation will probably be fixed with the redesigned Sounding Picker Tim's working on. I'm not certain when we can expect that to be done, as Tim said there's a lot of flexibility we're trying to incorporate into that portion of the program. We want to make it easier for others to add sounding sources to the program, as we have multiple parties interested in using the program such as folks at NOAA/NCAR/universities/etc. We really appreciate your extra help in figuring out the BUFKIT files and the installation tutorial. We're just three OU students putting this thing together right now, so things like this help us push the program past the beta phase.

The full documentation will probably be the next thing I start working on. For now you can use the SPC documentation for their sounding page and the SHARPpy README together. Combined both of those should cover at least 90% of the available features in the SHARPpy GUI as much of the program mimics the functionality you'll see on the SPC observed online sounding images:

http://www.spc.noaa.gov/exper/soundings/help/index.html

I think right now our primary goal is to get the program past the beta status, which many of our beta testers have really helped out here.

Drew and Andy...I just updated the README to be a little more clear about the steps to install. You will need to be familiar with command line to install this, but the number of steps is quite simple. We have plans to try to make this a portable executable so you don't have to go through all the steps with the command line to install the program, but that's another item on the never-ending list of things to do with the program.

For all, here's a link to the program:

https://github.com/sharppy/SHARPpy
http://sharppy.github.io/SHARPpy/index.html

 

[rdale]

Many thanks Greg... And I saw the tutorial which I was able to play with - but I'm looking for even more basic than that Just any sort of "Intro to Python" (especially one with a weather tilt if that exists.) I'm a programmer so that part is fine - just completely unfamiliar with Python and not sure where/how to start.

 

[Greg Blumberg]

No problem Rob! Thanks for helping clarify what you were looking for. I've heard this was a good link, but it's not weather oriented:

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/

Tim and Kelton may know some better ones, but I would start working through that link after downloading and installing Anaconda.

 

[Andy Berrington]

Hi Greg, I did get the GUI to work (it brings up the map of the sounding sites/etc.), but when I try to generate the profiles, I get the following error message in the command prompt (terminal):

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "full_gui.py", line 382, in complete_name
self.skewApp()
File "full_gui.py", line 444, in skewApp
prof_time=self.prof_time, run=self.run, idx=self.prof_idx)
TypeError: __init__() takes exactly 4 arguments (2 given)

This was trying to get the 3/25 21z soundings for the 12z GFS.

 

[Greg Blumberg]

Andy, you may need to update to the most recent version. I just did so and it works fine for me. I know we've been making some bug fixes to the sounding picker recently and some of the bug fixes have led to even more bugs (which is the nature of programming), so that's likely the problem.

 

[Andy Berrington]

Andy, you may need to update to the most recent version. I just did so and it works fine for me. I know we've been making some bug fixes to the sounding picker recently and some of the bug fixes have led to even more bugs (which is the nature of programming), so that's likely the problem.

Thanks. Will give it a try.

Edit: Yup that fixed it.