FINALLY, after several days of coding and several months of troubleshooting, WeatherTogether has its own model charts! Before I go any further, I have to thank Quinn Abrahams-Vaughn for writing some html and javascript pages to get me started with model visualization and Derek Hodges for his guidance on shell scripting and crontabs to automatically download model data. Below, I’ll give the motivation for this project, demo some charts, and lay out the path forward from here.
Motivation: Create engaging weather models to spark an interest in our natural world:
When I first discovered National Center for Environmental Prediction’s (NCEP) Model Analyses and Forecasts site in 6th grade, I was hooked. Every day after coming home from school, I’d immediately check the incoming GFS charts to see if there any floods, windstorms, or arctic outbreaks planned in the future. It didn’t matter if these storms disappeared with the next run – for me, the thrill was in seeing what could happen.
My fascination with weather models jump-started my introduction to some of the more technical aspects of meteorology. After getting a handle on reading precipitation and sea-level-pressure charts, I started to look at other, more complex charts, learning as I went. Even today, I find that looking at models that show parameters that I don’t have a firm understanding of is a fun and effective way to learn about those parameters.
I decided a long time ago that I wanted to make beautiful and easy-to-understand weather models that were as educational and inspiring as they were practical. Using Grads (the language used to make the plots) and Bash (the language used to download the data, upload the image, and everything in between), it’s been about 5% coding and 95% troubleshooting, but we finally have the beginnings of what I hope can become a much larger project!
Using these Models:
The models can be accessed by clicking on the “models” tab in the menu, either on my personal blog or the main WeatherTogether site. From here, you can choose which model you would like to view. We currently are producing charts from three of NCEP’s (a division of NOAA) models: the GFS, NAM, and GFS Ensembles.
Clicking on any one of these links will bring you to a new page that lists the charts we currently have up, organized by region. These models run 4 times a day (00z, 06z, 12z, and 18z, where z stands for “zulu” and is equivalent to Greenwich Mean Time). To find the latest model run, just refer to the schedule at the top of the page.
To go to a run, simply click on one of the blue hyperlinks next to the description of what’s being plotted. In the chart above, I’ve highlighted the 12z GFS 2-meter temperature, 10-meter wind, SLP (sea-level-pressure), and 1000-500 hPa thickness chart. Temperatures may have cooled off from their record highs throughout the Western U.S, but the temperatures in the Desert Southwest are still nothing to sneeze at!
The GFS ensemble does not yet have any of the more “traditional” plots like the one shown above. Instead, it features animations of a single plot called a “meteogram” through multiple runs. A meteogram is a plot of some meteorological variable through time, and animating meteograms through multiple runs allows one to quickly identify a trend in the models. Right now, the meteograms animate forward in time, with the most recent run last. I hope to have the operational GFS run in its entirety soon… the timestep change at hour 240 is giving me some problems. That’s the fun part about this project… you learn so much in the process!
These models use the lovely HAniS Webapp by Tom Whittaker (shown in the meteogram above) for image animation. The controls are pretty self explanatory – play around with them and see what happens!
The Path Forward:
Besides simply getting more and more charts up, there are two main things we’d like to get accomplished in the relatively near future. First, on the web development side, we’d like to design a more user-friendly interface that allows somebody to choose the chart they want to look at without having to click through so many links. Second, keeping in line with the motivation for making these models, we’d like to make a series of entertaining, engaging, and educational posts and/or videos explaining the meteorological parameters plotted in these charts. If you are interested in either of these ventures or have another idea on how to make WeatherTogether the go-to site for educational (and colorful) weather models, please send me an email at charlie@weathertogether.net.
Thanks for reading. Hope you enjoy the charts!