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20040311: Searching for SH cold-front bulletins

>From:  Greg Williams <address@hidden>
>Organization:  ?
>Keywords:  200403101604.i2AG4PrV008927 IDD frontal analyses

Hi Greg,

First, let me apologize for not responding to this note earlier.  I
was out of the country until the night of Wednesday, March 10, and
then I was involved in two days of meetings here at the UPC.  Right
now I am digging myself out of the email that piled up...

>Do you know of a source for southern-hemisphere (non-USA) cold-front
>bulletins?

Sorry, no.  I would be greatly interested in such bulletins, however.
Interactions I had with folks at the Universidad de Costa Rica
indicated that there is a widespread desire for analyses such as this.

>It seems that the software exists to plot these, and (for the US at least) 
>NCEP generates ASUS/FSUS bulletins for local areas - but does anyone 
>produce similar info on a global basis?

I don't know.  This would be a great question to send to the larger
Unidata community.  I would like to encourage you to subscribe to the
ldm-users and needdata email lists that we maintain and post your query
to those lists (you have to subscribe to Unidata-maintained email lists
before you can post to them; this helps keep spam out of the lists).

>I'd like to render pressure charts for the globe (or selected areas around 
>the world) based on GFS, but can only find US-centric frontal 
>positions/bulletins.

This is a desire of mine also!

Cheers,

Tom

>From address@hidden  Mon Mar 15 13:24:14 2004

Tom,

Thanks for the feedback.  I've looked a bit further and have still failed 
to find any source of these data (at least available to the public).  I was 
particularly surprised to find that NOAA/NWS themselves don't seem to 
produce global frontal analysis products in support of GFS and other global 
models.

I used to work for a weather company that did global edits of gridded GFS 
(and other) data, in order to value-add to it by inserting tropical storms, 
hurricanes, fronts, and high/low markers, etc.  These could easily be 
exported in a similar format to ASUS1/FSUS2 bulletins (ie. front-type, and 
a list of lat/lons to draw a spline through).  However, this was treated as 
a chargeable product and not free for public use.  The editing program, 
however, is maintained by Environment Canada - and I'm fairly sure that EC 
and even the UKmet office produce supplementary data in the same way.

I'm currently searching in the direction of FSL and/or MDL agencies (in the 
US), whom I believe developed a similar editing tool at some point. You'd 
think that somewhere there exists an organisation building McIdas- and 
Gempak-compatible datasets (for use with the FRNTDISP program).  I live in 
hope...

We're not in a position to create southern-hemisphere fronts etc just yet, 
but in the next 6 months we'll probably have to add this capability 
ourselves and look at ways to publish it (probably best to make it 
compatible and then distribute via LDM).  That still leaves China and 
Russia without coverage, but maybe someone will chip in.

  - Greg