Reviving the Weather Wizard Applet

It needs to be signed (to be trusted)..., but give it a try: here (in full), or below (in small).

This demonstrates a small subset of the features of the Weather Wizard. There is no GRIB, no routing, no possibility to save anything.
But that gives you a taste of the possibilities.

The applet is signed. That means it wants to get out of the Sun sandbox. Namely, it wants to read the faxes from an external website.
Once you have selected your composite (from the top drop-down list), do not forget to hit the "Go" button...

Micro Patterns

Combining the chart backgrounds and the GRIB smoothing, we can come up with a local pattern, which can actually make some sense, specially for local conditions (wind and kite surfers might be interested).

The image above is the display of the following request:

  GFS:42N,32N,128W,116W|1,1|0,3..168|PRMSL,WIND,HGT500

It is displayed with a GRIB 2D smoothing of 6 (cells are 10x10 nm) and a time smoothing of 3 (one frame every hour). The total time is one week, that makes 168 frames.
At the entrance of the San Francisco Bay, the wind goes from WSW on Wednesday at 06:00 UTC, to South and 12:00 UTC, to North on Friday at 00:00 UTC. Interesting...
This feature - and the associated background - will be available soon, in the next patch version of the software.

Routing now avoiding land

Sounds obvious, I know, but the routing is now - on request - able to avoid land.

The feature is being developed - ie it works on my machine - and will be available in beta soon (in 3.0.0.5).
There will be some limitations for the inland seas, like Caspian, Aral, Black Sea, Great Lakes... But that should beOK for the rest of us.
As always, the code will be available on Google Code.

New display option for faxes

There is a new display option for the faxes.
We used to have check boxes on the right side of the chart panel, to hide or show the various data (charts, faxes, GRIB file, etc).
We now have the possibility to have radio buttons (instead of the check boxes) for the faxes. A right click on the check box panel will prompt you for the option.
That allows you to scroll through the faxes one by one. One fax would be displayed at a time. That would be specially useful when a composite is targeted to display faxes of the same zone, for current time, 24h forecast, 48h forecast, 96h forecast, etc.

Rain in the SF Bay

It's raining in the San Francisco Bay Area...
This winter has been very unusual so far, sunny and dry - and cold.
The responsible is the 500mb configuration, as explained in this article. It also explains why at the same time the weather has been so bad in Alaska.

Routing Slicing

Just like we had a GRIB Slicing feature, you can now visualize the conditions at the routing level.

Drag the mouse on the top pane, and that tells you where you are on the chart, with a big red dot.

Beside that, it was so windy today in Oyster Point that the wind blew my glasses off my nose... I just could see them sinking 30 feet away from the dock. Rats!

Fax crawler, for SailMail users

I wanted to get something more dynamic for the patterns that can be used at sea...

When ashore, no problem, the faxes are pulled out from the Internet.

At sea, that's different, you have GetFax (from SailMail) downloading the faxes from the SSB onto your hard drive, and when it's about putting the faxes together in a composite, that used to be a painful experience, you had to locate the faxes one by one... Baaaaad.

There is now a new kind of dynamic pattern. If the protocol used to get the fax(es) is not http, then there is a surprise. There is a "search:" protocol implemented like in:

search:chartview.util.SearchUtil.findMostRecentFax(".*500.*", "${fax.path}")

That allows the soft to crawl the directory where the faxes are downloaded.

It does not look that friendly, but that is quite powerful, and extendable. After the "search:" keyword is the name of the Java class and method used to find the right fax. That method must be static, take two String parameters, and return a String value, that's all. The first parameter is a regular expression to match the description of the fax to find. SailMail appropriately stores this information when a fax is downloaded through GetFax... The second parameter is the root directory to start the search from, to find the most recent, matching the regular expression pattern. In the example above, it is the value of the path stored in the Weather Wizard preferences.

It is extendable in the sense that you can write your own crawlers, in Java. It just needs to be put in the classpath.

The same kind of syntax and method is available for the GRIBs as well.

search:chartview.util.SearchUtil.findMostRecentFile(".*\.(grb|grib)$", "${grib.path}")

The idea when at sea is to have GetFax running in "auto" mode for a while, and then to use this kind of composite pattern in the Weather Wizard. This way, this rendering is just one - I said "one" - click away:

Even fuzzy faxes make sense. Click the image... Cool!

To learn how to use this feature the best way, just Google "Regular Expression", this is soooooooooooo kewl!

Contour detection

I just finished big improvements in the contour detection of the GRIBs. The performances are now correct (a few milliseconds per GRIB layer, for a full Pacific GRIB 2 degrees by 2 degrees).
Now the contour detection can be part of a GRIB Animation.
In addition, there are now new check boxes to show and hide already computed contour lines, just like for the faxes.
The picture shows PRMSL and 500HGT contours detected in a South Pacific GRIB. Notice that there is now an option to show only the detected contours (with no wind or other GRIB data).

Kick-ass Processing

That has been on my todo list for quite a while, rendering a GRIB with the Processing framework. Here is a first glance at what it can look like

Move the mouse on the figure to move the light. Drag the mouse to rotate the figure.
It is a 3D representation of the Pressure at Mean Sea Level on 2010-Feb-11.
I finally understood how the thread model of Processing is done. Once you get it, it's all downhill!

Archives 2009 available

From this page, you can now reach several kinds of archives, along with real-time data. We had in the past the composites archives - which can be opened and rendered by the Weather Wizard - we now have images generated after the composites, they can be visualized from your browser.

Check out this link for details.

Color Faxes

We can now integrate color faxes, like this one.
It is a bit special in the sense that

• It's a square projection (Anaximandre)
• It is in several colors.

Anaximandre never was a problem, but the multiple colors is something that was not managed.
We now have the possibility to just make a fax transparent, without changing the black to another color (which is a possibility that still remains).
Having the colored fax transparent allows as usual superimposition with other data, like GRIBs or charts.
We can produce a rendering like this:
Some improvements in the image processing have been done too, regarding the transparency, and the sharp and blur. Looks much nicer. I had the idea of doing it by looking at what OpenCPN was doing for their charts rendering, which is much nicer than Maptech, based on the same data files.

3rd dimension for GRIB smoothing

We already had the surface (2D) smoothing, we now have a time smoothing for the GRIB data.
That means that you can get a better resolution for the GRIB cell (divide the cells, and set the values based on the ones of the cells around), the same is now available for time.
You download a 2 degrees by 2 degrees GRIB, for 3 days, every 24 hours, you can very well render a GRIB of 1 degree by 1 degree (or less), every 1 hour. And it works pretty well (offshore, of course, local coastal phenomenons, like the one shown here, cannot be taken care of by a GRIB).
In addition, some performance issues have been fixed, impacting the GRIB animation. With the previously described feature, we can now generate an animation that shows a frame every hour.
That will definitely minimize the demand on the SSB, when downloading the data at sea.
For example, you download a GRIB file for a given area, with cells 2° × 2°, with a frame every 24 hours. With the smoothing, you can easily display it with a 1° × 1° resolution (or less, your call), and with a frame every 1 hour. The equivalent GRIB would be 2×2×24 times bigger, that it 96 times bigger. That does not sound that great, but you can put it another way: instead of 1 minute to download it, it will take more that 1 and half hour. Sounds more convincing like that!
In addition, the dustlets take advantage of the same feature, you can watch really smooth animations.

Example:

A Composite has been displayed
Hide the faxes and place labels
Change the wind display to colors
Play animation, it's anything but smooth


Set a (2D) smoothing factor of 3
Looks better for each frame
Play animation, it's still not ideal


Now, set the time smoothing factor so it generates a frame every one hour
Play animation, it's now much better, perturbations evolution becomes way clearer.
Vancouver is going to be windy and wet again ;)

Externalizing the Look and Feel option

The possibility to apply a Swing Look and Feel on the UI has been externalized. You can apply any Look and Feel you want, its name will be mentioned in the command-line, or in the shortcut properties. That brings more flexibility to the user, and cuts the dependencies with the providers.
On the right is an example of what's possible, using the "Napkin" Look and Feel.
The default look and feel is the System one, not the Metal one (Java default).
Those who have already installed the program should re-install it, as some modifications in the launching script were made.

Transparent Tootip Window

There is now an option to display the data at the mouse in a transparent window of top of the chart, rather than using the regular tooltip bubble. The window can be moved within the chart boundaries just like any other window. It can also be resized, the font size follows the window's size.
There is also a new address to download the software, at http://weather.lediouris.net.

New feature: Load composite from the web

You can now load an archived composite from the web, in the Weather Wizard.
There are archived composites at http://donpedro.lediouris.net/weather/waz/, and they can be accessed directly. Go to File > Load Composite from the web.
There was a lot of activity in the tropical zone during the past weeks, hurricanes, typhoons, tropical waves, depressions and storms. They can be visualized this way, in case you did not follow those phenomenons on a daily base.

Routing Computation Improvement

Found - and fixed - an important performance bug in the routing computation.
That one appeared when a restriction like "Avoid TWS above XX" or "Avoid TWA below YY" was set.
It now behaves like the computation that has no restriction, which is good!
Update is available at its usual place, or through the automatic update mechanism.
Enjoy!

Repackaged...

I repackaged the install.
The dustlet is now implemented as a user-exit, that minimizes the dependencies.
I also integrated and modified the JGrib code, in order not to have to worry about Log4J, which was not quite mandatory in our case.
The best way to get the new version is to uninstall, and then re-install. This is because of some implied structural changes in the soft.

After that, the auto-update feature will keep working OK.

"What if" routing

Mostly dedicated to cruisers - not good for racing - here is a new feature.Think it like "What if I keep sailing at 50 degrees of the true wind, starboard tack, for 3 days?". Or "What if I keep heading 230 true for 5 days?".
This shows you where you would be! There are some limitations of course, like when you keep sailing head to wind, you wacky weirdo.

User Exit

Rendering of faxes and GRIB data seems to be an endless topic..., the soft this blog is about provides some options, but there is way more to do.

That's why we came up with this user-exit feature, that allows anyone who knows a bit of Java to do whatever he wants, with the faxes - reworked or not (color and transparency) - and the GRIB data. This creates an entry in the popup menu of the chart panel, which you can select to trigger external code. The only restriction is to implement a given Java Interface, and you can access the context of the chart panel. 

Above is an example of such a user-exit, smoothing and animating the GRIB data currently displayed in the chart pane. 500mb charts look a bit like a big slug drooling across the ocean...

We will soon post on the site a repository of such user exits (along with explanations about the way to write yours), the possibilities are endless.

The rendering provided by Processing is gorgious, I still need to look into it, for now I'm struggling with thread issues. They manage their own pool apparently, and I need to somehow sneak in... We'll see. 

The video above is a preview of the animated GRIB slug. It's smaller than the real one, but the picture on top will give you an idea of the actual size.

Introducing GRIB Slicing

We now have the possibility on rendered GRIB file to draw a line. A graph will then show up, representing the values along the line of the different data contained in the GRIB. 

If the mouse is held clicked on the graph, then a red dot is displayed on the map (and on the line of course), showing where the point is geographically. It becomes easy to see where the wind is the strongest, the pressure the highest, the temperature the warmest, the precipitations the heaviest, etc.

This feature is available immediatly.