Andrew Donaldson wrote:
>
> > is there a contact point at the Australian
> > Bureau of Meteorology who can/will share technical details?
>
> James Kelly is probably the best contact, try j.kelly@xxxxxxxxxx
> James usually monitors this list, but he's away at the moment.
> You're also welcome to ask me.
>
> > for example, the radar display (main) expects a data file,
> > however the file is not in the ViasAD examples directory.
>
> This file should be the right format:
> ftp://ftp.bom.gov.au/sample/IDBRA000/IDR02POL.txt
>
Since I've done a little bit of work on this, I'll add my $.02. These are my
opinions based on conversations with James Kelly. If I misrepresent anything, I
apologize in advance.
The visad.bom.RadarDisplay class is really just a test program to display radar
data files that the BoM distributes from their radar sites. The format is
specific to the BoM (i.e. they are not NIDS files). RadarDisplay uses the
RadarAdapter class that uses the RadarFile class which actually reads the data
file. The data files are ASCII, and use a special compression scheme developed
by the BoM. If you use the file that Andrew specified above, you need to rename
it to radar.dat to use with RadarDisplay. You would also need the OUTLAUST
map file, which you can get at ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/dmurray/OUTLAUST.
RadarDisplay will display the data either as a 2D image of reflection values
mapped to RGB, or as a 3D display of the values with the reflection values
mapped to RGB and ZAxis.
The original goal of the visad.bom.Radar* classes was to be able to read these
data files to display them in the BoM's AIFS displays. However, that goal has
been superceded by the use of an ADDE server to collect the data files so
further work on the RadarDisplay program is not likely (as far as reading the
ASCII files).
Of particular importance in this package (as far as displaying radar data) are
the Radar*DCoordinateSystem classes which will transform range, azimuth (and
elevation) to lat, lon, (alt) (3D versions in parens). Unidata and other groups
at NCAR will be using these to develop programs for displaying the U.S. Level II
NEXRAD data.
As Andrew says, James is the best contact for questions on this package, but I
hope this helps.
