DA vs Gempak and Level II Support?

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weatherdrew
Junior Member
Posts: 5
Joined: Wed Sep 19, 2007 12:12 pm

DA vs Gempak and Level II Support?

Post by weatherdrew »

Greetings:

I've been using Digital Atmosphere Eq for about a year or so to generate, using wrapper scripting, Level III radar images for my website. I consider the radar data rendering that DA does quite superior to Gempak, mainly because of Gempak's requirement to GRID the data before plotting the data into a GIF.

Below are URL's to two images from close to the same time, from the same radar site. At first glance it is hard to tell any difference. The first one, produced by DA, plots the data in a traditional manner; that is to say the size of the bins and their telemetry grow smaller the closer in toward the radar site. This means the data is ever so slightly better represented at closer range to the site.

DA: http://www.simuawips.com/blog/resources ... _Image.gif
Gempak: http://www.simuawips.com/blog/resources ... _bref1.gif

The second image is a Gempak rendered radar. The image maintains a grid and somehow the data falls into each point in the grid. While the data further out is obviously blocky due to the range, it's the data closer to the radar that interests me. If you look, you can see that the data appears very blocky when compared to the DA image. I can only deduce that this is because of the grid that Gempak creates for each radar site.

Now my questions: what are the plans for Level II data support in the new versions of DA? Will their be enhanced scripting support, allowing large pools of radar images to be generated similar to how they are now? Will there be improvements to the update logic where as DA can check for updates intelligently (check the date on the file from the webserver and not download if the file on disk is newer, similar to wget's 'no clobber')?

Any insight would be appreciated, I know you guys are busy at the moment.

Thanks as always.
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