On Fri, Jun 08, 2007 at 07:10:14PM -0500, Jordi Gutierrez Hermoso wrote: > On 08/06/07, Enrico Zini <enrico@enricozini.org> wrote: > >In the last 2 years I've been working in a weather centre and I got to > >know, write and maintain a bit of meteorology-oriented software in > >Debian. > I work very tangentially in meteorology (more than anything, I just > solve PDEs that are inspired by meteorology), and I find your post > very interesting. Which software do you maintain? dballe[1], provami[1], msat[2] and related libraries. I'm polishing for release a tool to import data from geostationary and polar satellite images into DB-All.e and I'm about to start working on a GRIB and BUFR archiver. > Btw, do you know how can I have access to real meteorological data? > What free data is out there? It's not that I don't want to pay; it's > that I want to make a point about working only with free software and > free data. Right now, I mostly use libnoise to generate various levels > of coherent noise as initial conditions for my PDEs, but I would like > to be able to work with real data. It depends what kind of data you need. For gridded data, ECMWF are shamefully not publishing their data (ehy, I pay it with my taxes!) but they'd give you a limited amout of free data for research only (http://www.ecmwf.int/services/archive/). NOAA is much better, and you can access their GRIB archive at http://nomads.ncdc.noaa.gov/ I don't know much about where to get radar maps, geostationary satellite images in useable formats, polar satellite strides and point observations. I know that you can get realtime METAR reports for free from any airport because the gnome weather applet uses that, but I have no idea about where to get historical data. From my experience, NOAA is publishing much more data and code than the ECMWF is, so you may want to start looking there. But I work more with creating software that decodes, converts and makes sense of the data rather than with acquiring the data. So if you find a data source and the files are in a data format that you can't easily read[3], do let me know and I might be able to point you at some (free) software that opens the thing. Ciao, Enrico [1] http://www.smr.arpa.emr.it/software/DBalle.html (look for the poster link) [2] http://www.smr.arpa.emr.it/software/msat/msat.html [3] there are many such specialised formats, the most popular being BUFR, GRIB, HRIT and undocumented dialects of NetCDF. -- GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org>
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