Meteorological Applications


The script packages described on this page are designed for use with the Tcl Fltk scripting extension found elsewhere on this web site. If you are interested in metoerology, you can use these applications to aquire real time weather data from the web and display it in a graphical format.

Weather Map Animation

The Canadian Meteorological Center and the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Predication both make publically available weather analysis and forecast charts over the web. The Maps application package contains the scripts and display utilities needed to automatically download analysis and forecast products from either of these sites and then to display the graphics products as animation loops.

Map animatiion application

The animation program has a mouse interface that allows for the marking up of the weather charts with things like the positions of weather systems. When animates, the historical tracks of the systems can then be displayed.

This application an be configured to maintain a database of up to 1 year of weather charts that can subsequently be used to study the evolution of weather systems over the historical period.

The Maps application requires that the Image extension be installed on your system. Since the application is acquiring weather maps, which are typically relatively large graphics images, it is most suited for use on computers that have high speed internet connections. The US outputs alone can represent up to 1 GByte of images every 6 hours, so be careful about what download choices you make.

The Thermometer Application

Thermometer widget
 This script displays a couple of thermometer widgets that continuously update their readings from a web site operated by the Weather Network. The 2 thermometers display the current wet and dry bulb temperatures from a single reporting location. The thermometer script is contained in the standard Tcl Fltk distribution in the scripts directory.

The Weather Network offers a large number of station reports that can be selected by changing the thermometer script.

Station Plots

Example of a station plot
 The station plot application is contained in the standard Tcl Fltk distribution in the scripts directory. It accepts a list of Aviation Statiion Identifiers, and will maintain a continuously updated display of the latest observations for the selected reporting stations. The widgets will display the current report in a variety of formats, and maintain a history of up to 24 hours of reports which can be animated using the control buttons for the stations.

The widgets also extract the current normals, maximum, minimum and precipitation reports, as well as the 5 day forecast information available from the web site. Clicking on the control buttons of the station plot widgets allows the user to cucle through the various displays and information.

The information is continuously extracted from the Canadian Meteorological Center's public web site. All Canadian reporting stations, US stations and a large selection of International reports are available.

If you are running on Linux and have the Tcl GDBM package installed, also available from this site, this script will acquire a database of downloaded observation data that can be used for subsequent analysis of weather phenomena at the selected observation sites.