Couple of additions/corrections.
NWS is progressing with "super-resolution" (250m) software on the
WSR-88D systems, and has been for several months. Little fanfare goes
into that. However, the lower-resolution Level III data that most
mosaics come from is going to remain at 1 km resolution.
RIDGE radar is in an evaluation period to transform ALL their pages to
Level II and these will have super-res where/when it's available.
Super-res comes at a couple of costs, though.
1. Some platforms cannot tolerate increased rotation speed. These will
require up to 7 min to complete a volume scan. A new volume scanning
profile will give 0.5 deg elevations more frequently.
2. Some radars will tolerate higher RPM scanning. These will complete
a volume scan every 5 min in storm/precip mode. These, too, will scan
at the lowest elevation several time in a "surveillence" sweep while
acquiring a volume scan.
3. Super-res is larger data, making processing take longer.
4. The new software build changed the file naming process complicating
regular expression parsing and making their capture and decoding more
"interesting".
5. NWS is upgrading both the path to the regions from the individual
radar sites from 56k to 128k to accommodate the larger files.
6. NWS is reconfiguring the network that handles the radar data to
distribute it and to get it to the National Climatic Data Center to a
higher-bandwidth Qwest path.
And, the file size increase is also a bit more than 16x... there's more
elevations in the standard volume scan for Build 10, providing better
resolution in vertical slicing too.
gerry
Brian Webster wrote:
In most areas of the country no. The reason being that the mechanical radar
units take at least 5 minutes to complete a sweep. I attended a skywarn
meeting this winter and NOAA/NWS will be upgrading to phased Radar antenna
arrays with electronic sweep actions thus eliminating the mechanical delay
and also giving them the ability to quickly look at problem areas when
needed. The resolution per pixel will also increase to 1/4 square kilometer,
now the pixels are 1 square km. The problem with the new resolution is the
size of the image files. Most NWS offices don't have enough bandwidth to
serve the public with a file size increase of 16 times what they currently
dish out.
Thank You,
Brian N2KGC
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]]on Behalf Of Jason KG4WSV
Sent: Sunday, April 19, 2009 7:53 PM
To: Xastir - APRS client software discussion
Subject: [Xastir] faster radar image updates?
Looks like the RIDGE radar images only update every 5 minutes or so.
Is there a source for more frequently updated radar imagery that can
be had in an xastir friendly format?
-Jason
kg4wsv
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--
Gerry Creager -- [email protected]
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University
Cell: 979.229.5301 Office: 979.458.4020 FAX: 979.862.3983
Office: 1700 Research Parkway Ste 160, TAMU, College Station, TX 77843
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