The Weather Forecasting Forum

I have added code to parse hurricane tracks from NHC's 4 models and UKMO/GFDL. This only works in the Atlantic basin at present and possibly in the eastern Pacific.

The file is a patch for Digital Atmosphere Workstation here:
http://www.weathergraphics.com/download.htm

You may be asked whether to replace digatmos.urx. Answer "yes" to have your Internet resource file updated with locations for NHC/UKMO/GFDL track data. Answer "no" if you wish to prevent any custom changes you've made to your URL tables from being overwritten (but you won't have the URLs for the track data). Most users should answer yes. In V1.1e official hurricane forecasts are now plotted with a linewidth of 2 and in dark red. There is no way of controlling this, but appropriate Style settings will be created soon.

Output maps will look similar to this:
http://www.stormtrack.org/ivan.gif

This version also adds the scripting command HURRMODEL,labeltype to invoke the model plots. Labeltype controls how the output looks: use 0 for spline only, 1 for spline with forecast points, and 2 for spline, points, and model type label. The default that is used from the dropdown menu is always 2.

PROFESSIONAL USERS: You may install this patch but it will downgrade your installed version to Standard. Please contact me to get the Pro patch, or you may use your same login details as last time to access it.

Tim

Also I notice that the NHC and GFDL resources at:
http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/raw/wh ... hg.hur.txt
http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/raw/wh ... hg.qlm.txt
are continuously swapped out with different storms during the day. This makes it unpredictable what is being viewed. If anyone can suggest alternate sources that are "locked" to one storm with a static URL, or contain all such bulletins for one calendar day, then let me know and I'll make the changes.

Tim

Tim,

I can not find an entry in the URX menu in order to pull down the model forecast tracks - I did allow my URX file to be updated.

Tim,

A good source for these bulletins can be found at the following url.

http://twister.sbs.ohio-state.edu/text/ ... ic/models/

Data goes back 2 years and includes both Atlantic and East Pacific storms.

I think the time tokens will work with this site but, I have not tried it yet.
I've just been coping and pasting the bulletins into the "queue.hur" file.
It's not automated but it works!

Kevin McBride

Tim,

I have tested the V1.1e update patch on three PC’s and all of them did not update the DIGATMOS.UR0 or the DIGATMOS.URX files. I did a clean install on a 4th PC and this got the correct files:- in the end I manually added the following lines to the URO and URX files and this now works

(watch any line wrap – should be three lines intotal)

HUR FCSTX X Hurricane model forecast (NHC) http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/raw/wh ... hg.hur.txt
HUR FCSTX X Hurricane model forecast (UKMET) http://www.meto.gov.uk/sec2/sec2cyclone ... wtnt80.txt
HUR FCSTX X Hurricane model forecast (GFDL) http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/raw/wh ... hg.qlm.txt

Plots work fine after that

The time tokens won't work well for the files that are stamped with reception time (hh:mm format). That's a bad output characteristic of the datastreams (as far as DA is concerned) because it's impossible for software to determine the latest file without parsing the directory listing. There is some built-in capability to parse directories for the latest file (see user manual: Internet > Automatic Directory Search) but then again there are a multitude of directory formats so this would probably fail with various servers.

Tim