The Weather Forecasting Forum

Does anyone know of any suitable and reliable radar links to include in the retrieval panel for DAWS. I usually got
Albany with no problems but now none of the links bring me
any data.
Please advise ASAP!!

Randy

Randy,

Try...
http://weather.cod.edu/digatmos/radar/@R/@R.BREF1
or...
http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/SL.us008001 ... @f/sn.last

You, of course, will have to substitute the appropriate station identifier for the @R and/or the @f. The @R uses a 3-letter id while the @f uses a 4-letter id.

hth,
Bob

Bob:

I am not sure what you mean. Are you saying that using this COD link that you only can get data from one doppler site at a time? I'm looking for data for the CONUS and other locations to plot hurricane and local plots.

Please advise.

Thanks,
Randy

Randy,

Yep, with DAWS, it's one site at a time. The older RCM data isn't supported and the new Nexrad data isn't combined into a national "mosaic" file by anybody on the 'net that I'm aware of. And even if it were, DAWS wouldn't be able to handle it because Tim elected to omit this functionality.

You 'can' download more than one radar location at a time to create a regional mosaic, but don't go overboard. Generally, you should try to keep it to fewer than a dozen sites. More than this will probably crash the program, or at the least, the radar polygons won't get drawn.

hth,
Bob

Unidata is making a 1km mosaic 0.5 deg reflectivity dataset and distributing it. It is in the NOAAport GINI format. Not sure if any *.edu sites are making it available or not. I know that it isn't one of the data sets COD has made available but we are ingesting it.

texsky wrote:Randy,

Yep, with DAWS, it's one site at a time. The older RCM data isn't supported and the new Nexrad data isn't combined into a national "mosaic" file by anybody on the 'net that I'm aware of. And even if it were, DAWS wouldn't be able to handle it because Tim elected to omit this functionality.

You 'can' download more than one radar location at a time to create a regional mosaic, but don't go overboard. Generally, you should try to keep it to fewer than a dozen sites. More than this will probably crash the program, or at the least, the radar polygons won't get drawn.

hth,
Bob

Okay then how would I collect the data to do a regional mosaic using COD? I mean, how would I enter this into DAWS retrieval panal?

This is interesting because every time I got nexrad off the Albany site, it was for the CONUS..... Go figure!

RG

Well, perhaps the best thing to do would be to avoid using the data retrieval window altogether and use the site retrieval map that's provided with DAWS. Simply go to Radar -> Set Nexrad Station and a map will pop up that will allow you to graphically choose which sites you want to download. After you've made your choices, select Radar -> Base Reflectivity and you should see DAWS download and display the radar data for you.

If the above method doesn't appeal to you, you can write a script which will do all of this automatically using the script scheduler.

If you reeeaallly want to do it your way, you'll have to go to the data retrieval panel, choose "add site", enter the URL of the radar you want to download and choose a name for the site. Then, you'll need to repeat this procedure for each Nexrad location you want to view. Next, put a checkmark by each site and select Retrieve. After the download is complete, you'll have to go to the Radar menu and select "Load Radar Data from file" and choose either "http.bin" or "incoming.bin...(they should be located somewhere in your data directory). This should then display your chosen Nexrad sites. To me, this is a quite a bit more cumbersome than the methods mentioned above, but, it should work.

hth,
Bob

Man, when it rains, it pours! Now I have a new problem!

I tryed using the radar map and selected about 6 ot 7 sites to plot, then clicked on BREF. I now get an error:

"ACCESS VIOLATION AT ADDRESS 0054BCAF IN MODULE digatmos.exe READ OF ADDRESS 02253000"

This happens everytime I attempt to get radar data. I'd like to know why this is happening? It ran smoothly til now!

Randy

Randy,

A couple of quick questions...

A.) What version of DAWS are you using?

B.) What sites are you trying to download?

Bob

BGSU has all 15 NIDS products for all 154 stations available:
http://weather.bgsu.edu/weather/nexrad/NIDS/