[IDV #LED-545261]: Using IDV (storm tracks)

> Hi Jeff, Don and Yuan,
> greetings from Baja California and I hope you had a good holiday season.
Hi Luis,
And happy holidays to you as well!

> 
> I am involved in a short (one week) course on tropical cyclones over the
> eastern Pacific. It is for graduate students from Latin American
> institutions, mostly from Mexico. My participation requires to
> provide a practical session and I am thinking to use IDV to
> plot storm tracks for the eastern Pacific basin.
> 
> There is some progress I did during the last few weeks and, also, some
> aspects that may become a problem during the course. One of them is
> the need to access the ATCF database over the internet. Since we
> will be using a limited portion of the database (for example,
> a single season or a few years), perhaps we can already have
> the database on the local disk and save the internet
> connection. I do not know if this is a feasible
> option and the modifications we may need to
> apply in the IDV configuration.
In the workshop docs there is a section on the storm track data source using 
data from a different ftp site:
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/IDV/docs/workshop/datadisplays/trajectory/StormTracks.html

This could also work on a local disk. Go look at the directory structure we 
have on our copy:
ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/idv/data/atcf/
This has 2006, 2007 and (I think) 2008 data. For your convenience I tarred up 
the dir:
ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/idv/data/atcf.tar.gz


This is just the directory structure of the main ftp site:
ftp://ftp.nhc.noaa.gov/atcf/

but with only a few years.

Instead of having this on a ftp site you could have this directory structure on 
a local disk. In the File Chooser choose the directory and specify the ATCF 
Data Source type and you should be good to go.




> 
> Something else that I noticed is that the blue marble image seems to
> come from a NASA address. If this is correct, does it make sense to
> have it on disk too?
> 

We recognized this problem (especially the blue marble server is always 
overloaded and throws errors). We made a change this past Fall so there is a 
set of static geolocated images that come with the release. Now, when you add a 
background image display the default is a static blue marble image (all the 
ones labeled with "static" are, of course, static).  Of course, you cannot zoom 
in and get higher resolution but if networking or the wms servers are a problem 
this static images work pretty well.

-Jeff



Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: LED-545261
Department: Support IDV
Priority: Normal
Status: Closed