NEXRAD Radar Imagery

I've been hooked on a challenge that I presented myself: Figure out a cool way to combine weather data into the most useful raw data.

There are TONS of great weather-related resources in a recent Ask Slashdot article! Most data is provided by the National Weather Service (NWS) for free on the Internet. The only major exception I’ve found so far is NLDN lightening data, which even the NWS has to purchase from Global Atmospherics.

The most useful raw data for forecasts is available from the National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD). Using the command line utilities, I’ve been able to extract an 8 day forecast in 3 hour increments in CSV text format! That’s tons of things like percentage chance of precip and wind direction and speed. (Yay, kite flying!)

Essentially data is data is data. Current the NWS makes NEXRAD radar data publicly available as well! It looks to be updated about every 10 minutes or so, with an archive.

I’ve been looking into the GRASS GIS package as well in order to visualize fly-through animations. Scott Shipley at George Mason University has created a tool in order to convert NEXRAD into Shape files needed by GRASS (and other GIS systems). Shape files are actually just raw longitude and latitude with a value, so his utility would provide the needed information to figure out if it is raining (or going to rain soon) in a text-based format.

I’ll keep you informed!