Thanks Mark for that info.
Rob W
From: Mark Newton
Sent: Friday, September 8, 2017 11:26 PM
To: Discussion of issues relating to Soaring in Australia.
Subject: Re: [Aus-soaring] RASP no longer updating/needed for SA
On 7 Sep 2017, at 4:11 PM, Rob Wintulich <r...@signwizard.com.au> wrote:
Yes, I care and I also love that particular RASP facility.
My understanding is that someone appropriately informed and willing needs to
service an area to keep it up and running. Mark Newton may be someone who
might be able to inform us better!?!
Nah, I’m the temp trace guy, not the RASP guy.
The temp trace site is still ingesting data, and still running. I haven’t
looked at the logs recently to see how often it’s being used, but as long as
data is available it’s still able to work.
Data is less available than it used to be. In 2004, Peter Temple organized a
free account with the Bureau of Meteorology for the raw data on each of the
temp trace sites. They shut that down a couple of years ago. We got ten years
out of it for free, but they didn’t want to continue it without billing about
$2500 per annum to keep it alive, and the availability of RASP and Matt
Scutter’s experimentation with SkySight suggested to me that maybe that wasn’t
a good investment.
Consequently, I switched the data ingestion back to University of Wyoming’s
Upper Air Project, which gets the same BoM data I used to get, but with a delay
of about an hour. That’s why the traces aren’t as early each morning as they
used to be.
My site has stored every single sounding datapoint it has ingested for the last
14 years. The sounding data table in the database has about 22 million rows.
Nearly a decade and a half of several-times-per-day data for has proved to be a
useful resource to some people: I’ve been asked to make extracts available to
climate science departments at a couple of universities, and the data has
informed some PhD projects.
I reckon the hang glider folks still use it too. I occasionally get questions
or attaboys from them.
The best bit is that it’s required almost no maintenance, so I’m happy to let
it sit on my server more or less forever. I wrote the software in the first
half of the last decade, and except for a few small updates to cope with data
provider changes and a couple of week-long outages when I’ve moved house, it’s
run on autopilot ever since. I wish every software project I did was as
reliable as this one :-D
For the real die-hards (or moneyed,) a lot of folk are migrating to
subscription services like Matthew Scutter’s SkySight which offer even more
than ‘common’ old RASP, but for old hacks like myself who just want to be able
to pick out the regular good days each season, RASP is great. If the task of
maintenance is not too onerous I’d be happy to keep an eye on it, but I would
need guidance and assistance initially to get me ‘installed’
Honestly, I’d recommend SkySight. Not just because it’s empirically excellent,
but also because the gliding community is so small that useful facilities can
only continue to be provided if people who need them support them.
Matthew’s trying to make a living out of SkySight.io. He’ll be motivated to
keep it “good” as long as the money tap doesn’t dry up so much that he has to
get a real job instead :-)
- mark
Virus-free. www.avg.com
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