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Hi there! Glad to virtually meet you! And great to hear you're so familiar with other Unidata tools. > Recently I've been creating python based visualizations of > satellite imagery and model data. I teach synoptics at SJSU and I'm > thinking it might be good to expose the students to CAVE. I think both CAVE and python-awips could potentially be useful for you and your students! Now down to your questions: > 1) If starting from scratch and wanting to get my feet wet, do you recommend > setting up CAVE client and using data from the Unidata EDEX server? Definitely the easiest way to get started is to do exactly what you guessed: download a CAVE client locally (we have direct downloads for Linux and Mac, and two options for Windows -- a direct download which is a bit more involved, and a VM that has some limitations). Take a look at our instructions to get started there: http://unidata.github.io/awips2/install/install-cave/ And again, you are correct, connecting to our cloud-hosted EDEX is the quickest and *maybe* best option to get started. > - how much slower is this than having local EDEX server? Other limitations? This is a good question. I'm not sure if we've directly tested performance against a local machine and our cloud edex. I will say, our cloud edex is substantially larger than what we would expect most people to be running remotely, so it's probably your best option. Using a local edex would allow you to control more things though: - if you wanted specific data we don't have but you do (maybe different models, or various other products) - if you wanted data to stay around longer than ours (depending on the product, our archive lasts from 3 to 7 days) > 2) About how many Unidata member groups are running AWIPS/CAVE regularly > and how many choose to have their own EDEX server? Another good question. We're not exactly sure on that. But I can tell you we regularly have over 100 individual connections a day to our EDEX (meaning 100 unique machines). And I know of at least two instances of universities and a couple private organizations running their own EDEX, but I believe there are more. > 3) How difficult is setting up and maintaining EDEX server compared with LDM > ingest > and decoding. I would consider LDM very straightforward at this point. I would say the setup is a significant bit of work. With our help, we could probably get you set up within a few days, and there might still be a little bit of back and forth for some finer tuning. The part that might take a while is acquiring the proper machine, if you don't already have one, that suits what you're trying to accomplish. Maintaining the server isn't too bad, although depending on how much data you're ingesting, you might have to monitor it fairly closely. I wouldn't say edex crashes are a 'regular' thing, but it does happen, so you have to be able to stay on top of that. Not to mention that datasets can change, so you might have to make tweaks to different things such as the pqact.conf to make sure you're still ingesting the data you expect to be. Also, having prior experience with LDM would put you out in front of other users that we've helped set up their own EDEX, so I think you would pick certain parts up pretty quickly. > 4) do you have a recommended hardware set-up to handle CAVE duties > effectively? We have general recommendations and OS specific requirements for CAVE on our webpage here: http://unidata.github.io/awips2/install/install-cave/#general-requirements > How about an EDEX server? For an EDEX server, it really depends on what you're trying to do. Our current configuration uses two separate machines, although we may be expanding that in the near future. We've recently helped some users over at Texas A&M set up their own 3-machine EDEX server. If you want a lot of data, you will need at least one pretty powerful machine. If you just want to test a dataset or two, then a smaller machine would suffice. We can get into more details if this is something you're really interested in. > 5) Why would one want to use Python-AWIPS instead of CAVE? More > customizability? Good question! python-awips is basically a python API to access data on an EDEX. It's a programmatic way to access and manipulate the data. You mentioned at the beginning of your email that you're working on some python-based visualizations of satellite data. This is something python-awips can possibly help with (in the case that our EDEX has satellite data that maybe you can't get elsewhere, or in a nicer form). Take a quick look at some of our examples on our python-awips webpage here: http://unidata.github.io/python-awips/examples/index.html Specifically this one, relating to GOES: http://unidata.github.io/python-awips/examples/generated/Satellite_Imagery.html We also have some new GOES products that are soon to be available with our new AWIPS release. These include GeoColor, Debra Dust, Cloud Snow, Fog Probability, and a few more. Python-awips could be a nice way to introduce your students to python programming. With the edex server you can access all kinds of geological and geographical data like cities, state outlines, CWA's, lakes, etc. You can do most of this with cartopy as well, but I know cartopy doesn't have CWA's easily available. You can also follow the instructions for our source code with examples install which comes with an environment yml and all the example notebooks found on our webpage. The installation instructions are here: http://unidata.github.io/python-awips/index.html#source-code-with-examples-install > Is Python-AWIPS just a wrapper around all the MetPy routines? MetPy and python-awips are two completely separate python packages. You can definitely use them together though, and I think we do use MetPy in some of our examples. I hope this gets you started with some answers to your first questions. Please take a minute to download CAVE and try it out. Additionally, we have just recently started a blog series called AWIPS Tips that is released every other Wednesday. You can take a look at our first few blogs by going here: https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/blogs/news/tags/awipstips If you'd care to be in the know, feel free to join our awips mailing list (if you haven't already): https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/support/index.html#mailinglists Let me know how else we can help! --Shay Carter She/Her/Hers AWIPS Software Engineer UCAR - Unidata If you're interested, please feel free to fill out a survey about the support you receive: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeDIkdk8qUMgq8ZdM4jhP-ubJPUOr-mJMQgxInwoAWoV5QcOw/viewform Ticket Details =================== Ticket ID: YIF-768804 Department: Support AWIPS Priority: Normal Status: Open =================== NOTE: All email exchanges with Unidata User Support are recorded in the Unidata inquiry tracking system and then made publicly available through the web. If you do not want to have your interactions made available in this way, you must let us know in each email you send to us.