Some of you may recall a past thread similar to this, and I'm sort of
looking for ideas -- so if anyone has something better than what I
describe, I would love to know.
We've got a service, which we're about to open up to the world for free,
that notifies a subscriber via SMS when a RADAR site goes from 31/32 into
an "active" mode (you can choose the granularity of which VCPs you'd want
notifications for, just in case you didn't care about VCP 121, for
example). It's a very good 'heads up' that things are about to become
eventful. (The service can also send emails, push the data to a URL
endpoint, and even push it to apps.)
To that end, we keep track of the metadata (VCP, timestamp, etc) from all
the volume scans we ingest. At present, this requires us to use custom C++
code to actually decipher the L2 or L3 scans to locate the data. While
this generally works, the problem in this method is two fold:
- About 10% of the scans do not conform to the storage structure outlined
by the ROC, requiring us to write more kludges than I'd care to admit.
(ROC hasn't bothered to return communications regarding bugs we've
reported in this regard.)
- This is computationally expensive. (We're doing more than just pulling
the metadata, such as plotting the smoothed data over Google Maps, but you
can imagine than reading the entire L2 file just to find out the VCP is
inefficient.)
I've always wished there was a free text message type product on IDS/HDS
that would send the metadata along with each volume scan, but that doesn't
seem to exist. (We've requested it, but apparently the demand for this is
low.)
The closest thing I can find is something similar to this product:
http://www.rwic.und.edu/weather/text/KMAF/SDUS84.wmo
Its NNN is DPA and follows the WMO ID pattern of SDUS##...however, it's
only sent out hourly.
Can anyone think of a better way...or perhaps even point out a product I'm
perhaps not aware of?
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Blair Trosper
Updraft Networks / Weather Data
NOC: 469-844-5440
Early Watch Notifications: http://twitter.com/weatherwatches
