Software Highlight: WeatherScope
When You Need That Advance NEXRAD Radar Platform on Your Computer.
WeatherScope displaying the NEXRAD radar data for South Texas.
The threat of
nearby thunderstorms have inspired me to do another software highlight
post. Today, I'm going to focus on this really awesome piece of software
called WeatherScope. One could say that this is the computer equivalent
of wX on Android. WeatherScope is a radar program that get it's radar
scans from National Weather Service (NWS) locations throughout the
country. It was developed by the Oklahoma Climatological Survey along
with Oklahoma Mesonet. According to its description, the software can
create interactive maps and graphs with data from the Oklahoma Mesonet
and other sources, including NEXRAD radar data and data from NOAA’s
surface observing network. WeatherScope is a flexible and powerful tool
for building custom visualizations for analyzing both current and
historical data.
In short, it's data visualization with collected Weather data. In case you don't know what a data visualization program is, it's a program that is intended to display data in a way that human eyes can better understand. For example, with WeatherScope, one can show various climate trends over a long duration over a certain area. WeatherScope can provide powerful data visualization capabilities with weather and climate data. The data collected from the program can be displayed visually. Not only that, WeatherScope works really well as a general-purpose radar application. Like wX app for Android, this program does have a steep learning curve. Their are various options, like viewing different maps, different radar stations, humidity and precipitation levels. Not only that, but the overlays can be arranged on screen, so that it won't accidentally overlap the other data on the screen as well. It can also display the data as gradient-color overlays on the screen, or as numerical data. The map can be panned by the middle mouse button and zoomed, while the zoom-in feature is provided by the left mouse click. Zoom-out is performed by the right mouse click.
One of the things I love about this application is that it still runs on Windows XP. That mean's that this program will still run fine on my old IBM Thinkpad laptop running Windows XP. Another thing that I love is that WeatherScope, like wX, is free. It's amazing considering that the capabilities of this program can rival that of commercial applications. It can be downloaded from the Oklahoma Mesonet Page. It runs on Windows 7 as well without issues. I haven't tested Windows 10 though. WeatherScope is available for the Mac as well.
This program does have a few issues though. It doesn't always start up when you click on it, or it does after several minutes. It's dependent of a internet connection (how else could the data load if you don't have a connection?). It also hasn't been updated since 2014. It does still work as expected though, as the weather data is collected from NWS sources.
In short, it's data visualization with collected Weather data. In case you don't know what a data visualization program is, it's a program that is intended to display data in a way that human eyes can better understand. For example, with WeatherScope, one can show various climate trends over a long duration over a certain area. WeatherScope can provide powerful data visualization capabilities with weather and climate data. The data collected from the program can be displayed visually. Not only that, WeatherScope works really well as a general-purpose radar application. Like wX app for Android, this program does have a steep learning curve. Their are various options, like viewing different maps, different radar stations, humidity and precipitation levels. Not only that, but the overlays can be arranged on screen, so that it won't accidentally overlap the other data on the screen as well. It can also display the data as gradient-color overlays on the screen, or as numerical data. The map can be panned by the middle mouse button and zoomed, while the zoom-in feature is provided by the left mouse click. Zoom-out is performed by the right mouse click.
One of the things I love about this application is that it still runs on Windows XP. That mean's that this program will still run fine on my old IBM Thinkpad laptop running Windows XP. Another thing that I love is that WeatherScope, like wX, is free. It's amazing considering that the capabilities of this program can rival that of commercial applications. It can be downloaded from the Oklahoma Mesonet Page. It runs on Windows 7 as well without issues. I haven't tested Windows 10 though. WeatherScope is available for the Mac as well.
This program does have a few issues though. It doesn't always start up when you click on it, or it does after several minutes. It's dependent of a internet connection (how else could the data load if you don't have a connection?). It also hasn't been updated since 2014. It does still work as expected though, as the weather data is collected from NWS sources.
WeatherScope showing the relative humidity as numerical data for Oklahoma. The data was collected by the NWS.
Within the program,
the different data types are called products. They vary from different
types of maps, observations, and shapes. Data observations can be
displayed as gradient colors as well. One of the reasons why this
program has a steep learning curve is because everything with
WeatherScope can be customized, like the radars, observations, and even
the captions and types of colors used for the gradients. There are so
many options that a newbie could easily get lost. The maps with the
installed products can be saved as well, so that way you won't have to
reinstall the observations every time the program is closed or
restarted. The data on the screen can be saved as screenshots as well.
Here is the relative humidity levels for Texas being displayed in gradient colors.
This article was
intended to be a quick write-up about the WeatherScope software, and not
a how-to guide on how to use the program. Like wX, WeratherScope is a
very powerful application. It's a free program as well. Also, like wX,
this program does have a very steep learning curve, and I would say that
this app is not for the impatient. Also, the program hasen't been
updated since 2014. However, all the features within the program still
work as expected, since the weather data is pulled from NWS sources.
With that said, their are so many options within the program that can be
customized. The weather products offered through the program are very
useful, and the ability to get the NEXRAD radar data is very crucial as
well. I hoped you enjoyed this blog-post. At the very least, you learned
about another cool piece of software. You all have a good and dry day.
WeatherScope 1.9.6
WWW.MESONET.COM
Comments
Post a Comment