Example
Posted by Chris in Tampa on 8/20/2015, 11:39 pm
If all goes well, it should work for Friday's NOAA P-3 research mission if they release NOAA radar data. And I did in the end get the data to also appear on Hurricane City's version of the recon system, but there are so many things that could go wrong.

You click an icon and then in the window that pops up you click a link and then the overlay appears in Google Earth. Every little radar icon below has a radar image for it just like the last one noted.



Google Earth file:
http://hurricanecity.com/recon/archive/al/2015/nontasked/08-20-WX-Train-NOAA-3/map.kmz

Closeup:



With blue marble layer background added: http://hurricanecity.com/recon/recon.cgi?page=bluemarble

Technically the NOAA images are transparent but at the moment they appear black in Google Earth. I guess some transparent PNGs do that.



I was going to post the following to my Facebook page tonight, but I think I'll wait to see if it works again tomorrow. Here is my draft of that post:



On a highly experimental basis, starting today our site has successfully begun automatically adding NOAA P-3 radar data from The NOAA Hurricane Hunters into our recon system whenever the data is made available. It will automatically appear in our Google Earth mapping product soon after it is made available. This addition to our recon system is subject to error and may not be available at times. Additionally, more testing may be required on our site over the next few days in order to test this feature more thoroughly in real time during NOAA P-3 missions into #Danny. (Assuming radar data is made available during these missions.)

Most recently, radar imagery from NOAA P-3's has been made available as an overlay in Google Earth. By default, the NOAA radar icons in our Google Earth recon product are not displayed as a lot of icons can make the path very cluttered. You can click the folder marked "Radar Scans" in our normal Google Earth recon product to show points where radar data is available. After that you can click an icon which will contain a link that you can click in order to load the radar overlay for that position into Google Earth. Google Earth radar overlays are created by NOAA and we cannot verify the accuracy of their placement. This is an experimental product so please try to visually verify that a radar overlay has been placed correctly. If in doubt over the placement of an overlay, please ignore it.

Depending on what file type the radar image is made available in, sometimes a Google Earth product overlay might not be available. At times a radar thumbnail might be available in the popup window that you can click in order to visit our site and view a full size version of the image. Sometimes both options will be available. Going forward we will continue to try to make improvements to how we display this data.

Our system retrieves radar data with usually only the date of the radar scan. Coordinates are selected for an icon if the radar scan occurs within 15 seconds of an observation from an HDOB message. If an HDOB message is missing, our system may slightly delay the radar image from appearing in order to attempt to wait for the missing HDOB message to be available. If after a short period of time the HDOB message is still missing, and radar imagery is available, the image will be placed with the associated mission based on the time of the radar scan, but because coordinates could not be determined, the radar scan will not appear in our Google Earth recon product. It will instead only be placed in our site's archive for that mission. (In the future it may also appear in a clickable folder in Google Earth.)

Image:

Screenshot in Google Earth of Thursday's HRD-tasked ferry of NOAA 43RF ("Miss Piggy") from Tampa to Barbados. A radar scan appears along the track.

Image Credit:

NOAA-AOC / Google
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Hurricane Danny - cypresstx, 8/20/2015, 10:55 am
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