Welcome back to AWIPS Tips!
Today we’re going to touch on a relatively new dataset that was added from a request in our community. The dataset is from Remote Automatic Weather Stations (RAWS) and was requested to aid in fire response in California.
Pete Curran is an active member of our AWIPS community and works for Big Bear Fire Department and is an Incident Meteorologist (IMET) on California Interagency Incident Management Team 11. He came to us late last summer with a desire to see RAWS data in CAVE. He uses CAVE and our public EDEX actively at work to help combat fires in California. With his prompting, we decided to pursue a feed for the data, and figure out how to ingest it into AWIPS. Shown below is Pete in the field using our AWIPS:
Unfortunately, this data was not being distributed in the LDM network, and initially took some work to find a freely available access point. To achieve this, NSF Unidata contacted a third party, Synoptic Data, and were able to come to an agreement where we can pull RAWS data from them and redistribute it in AWIPS and our THREDDS servers. We want to thank Synoptic for the collaboration and efforts on their end to make this possible!
We were able to reformat the RAWS data into a format that could be recognized by an existing EDEX decoder - the ldadmesonet plugin. Because we didn’t have to write a decoder from scratch, we were able to get the data to our user in a timely manner.
We modified the Surface menu to support new loading options for RAWS data:
The current display is shown below, demonstrating the progressive disclosure feature (more data as you zoom in), and stepping through a few of the most recent frames of data:
We encourage suggestions and recommendations from our users to make AWIPS more applicable to their daily work. While this example isn’t from academia, the same sentiment applies. If you have desired datasets or functionality that does not currently exist in our public AWIPS, please feel free to submit any suggestions through our AWIPS reporting form.
Thanks for joining us and check back in two weeks for the next blog post.
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This blog was posted in reference to v20.3.2-1 of NSF Unidata AWIPS
