Last July I wrote about software I was developing for displaying forecast soundings. Unfortunately, after discussing what I already had done in preparation for last year’s Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT) Experimental Forecast Program (EFP), my schedule prevented me from devoting any time toward this project.

In the days before Christmas I realized that I needed to revisit SHARPpy (SkewT and Hodograph Analysis and Research Program in Python) if I was going to have anything for my presentation at the American Meteorological Society’s Annual Meeting in New Orleans, LA. So, the last two weeks has been devoted to frantic code writing to put together some form of SHARPpy in time for my presentation. When I sat down and looked at my old work, I couldn’t understand, nor could I remember, what I had been doing. I decided to throw out my old work and begin anew.

SHARPpy has been completely overhauled. The visual aesthetics are modeled after the Storm Prediction Center’s sounding analysis tool, NSHARP, and the underlying numerical routines are based on SHARP95. SHARPpy is written completely in pure Python — no Numpy, Scipy, or Matplotlib. In other words, once Python is installed on a computer, you can install and run SHARPpy — there are absolutely no additional dependencies to install! The motivation for sticking with pure Python, and sacrificing the speed Numpy, Scipy, and Matplotlib offer, was to allow for simple integration into the National Weather Service’s data visualization software package (Advanced Weather Information Processing System II — AWIPSII), which is currently under development. (Note, SHARPpy 2.0 will most likely be refactored to make use of Numpy, Scipy, and Matplotlib.)

SHARPpy is written in such a manner that the file handing and data management, graphical displays, and numerics are all separate. This greatly increases SHARPpy’s utility. Inside SHARPpy, all calculations are done on a custom data structure, called a Profile Object. The Profile Object consists of 6 data arrays: Pressure, Height, Temperature, Dewpoint, U-component of wind, and V-component of the wind, as well as some meta-data and helper functions to identify things such as the index of the surface layer. (Alternatively, one could provide the Wind Direction in degrees and Wind Speed and the Profile Object will convert these to the U-, V-components on the fly.) The benefit of using the Profile Object is that SHARPpy knows the structure of the data on which it will operate and/or draw. Thus, in order to add support for additional data types (observational, BUFKIT format, raw models, etc) all one has to do is create a wrapper to put the data into the Profile Object. (The Profile Object has helper functions to create itself. All one does is pass the 6 arrays!) Also, since the drawing is separate from the numerics, SHARPpy can be used to compute thermodynamic and kinematic parameters for model output — without having to actually draw individual soundings!

Below are a smattering of sample images created this evening.

The first image is tonight’s sounding from Miami, FL. The temperature trace is in red, the dewpoint trace is in green. The blue trace corresponds to the wet-bulb temperature. The yellow-traces (there are more than one, they just overlap!) are the parcel trajectories for a Surface-Based Parcel, 100-hPa Mixed Layer Parcel, and the Effective-Inflow-Layer Mixed Parcel. In the upper-right, the hodograph is displayed with white dots indicating each 1km AGL interval. (Note, the program goes out to the web and downloads the data, lifts all the parcels, and draws the display in about 1-1.5 seconds!)

In addition to computing the visual SkewT and Hodograph, SHARPpy can compute kinematic variables and parameters. Below are just a sample of the fields that can be computed. Wind information is displayed in a format of U-, V-component, Wind Direction @ Wind Speed. Helicity information is provided positive+negative helicity, positive helicity, and negative-helicity. Again, this takes less than 0.5 seconds to compute and display. (These are for the Miami, FL sounding displayed above.)

Below is a small sample of the thermodynamic variables and parameters that can be computed. All five parcels (Surface, Mixed-Layer, Most-Unstable, Forecast Surface, and Effective Inflow Layer) are computed. This routine takes about 0.5 seconds to run. (These are for the Miami, FL sounding displayed above.)

Lastly, I’ve incorporated preliminary support for ensemble soundings. Below are five, 4-km storm-scale ensemble member forecasts for Birmingham, Alabama. These model simulations were created in support of last year’s HWT EFP. They were initialized at 00 UTC 27 April 2011 and are valid for 21 UTC 27 April 2011. Each forecast member has over 1100 sounding locations, with 37 forecast soundings at each location. These data are stored in a text file that is approximately 150MB per member! SHARPpy can read these text files, parse out the correct soundings, compute all the parameters, and draw the sounding in less than 5 seconds!

What is displayed are the temperature, dewpoint, wet-bulb temperature, and hodograph for each of the 5 members. The thicker lines are from the “control member” and the other lines are from various perturbations. I should also point at that the wind barbs plotted on the right of the skewt are from the control member, as well.

I still have a lot of work left ahead of me (such as fixing up some of the displays and incorporating the text output on the main graphical display), but SHARPpy is coming along nicely. If you will be attending the AMS Annual Meeting later this month, please be sure to stop by my talk! It’s in the Python Symposium and will take place Tuesday morning at 11:15 AM. After my presentation, I hope to release SHARPpy to the open-source community. This will give people the ability to download and test SHARPpy while it is still under development, provide feedback, and even help develop new features! Some features that I’m interested in including are time-height cross-sections, more winter weather support, and whatever else might come to mind! It is my hope that SHARPpy can become a community supported sounding analysis package that the meteorological community can coalesce around!

And, for my international friends, if you aren’t fond of SkewTs, SHARPpy can also make STUVEs!

Please let me know what you think!

Those who know me well know that I absolutely love to tease those with whom I am friends. To this end, below is a rather unflattering picture of me taken this week at the Weather Ready Workshop. I encourage everyone to take a moment and create a caption for this photograph. Please post your caption in the comments! (And, please, try and keep the captions somewhat clean!)

Tonight, as many mourn the loss of Steve Jobs, keep in mind that the next person to change the world as he did might be you.

Every Saturday during the fall, life in the southeastern United States comes to a stop. Attention turns toward college football and the escape from reality it offers. This break from reality has never been more needed for the city of Tuscaloosa, AL. Home to the University of Alabama, this city was devastated by a tornado during the historic 27 April 2011 tornado outbreak. Here’s a good story from ESPN on the impact of today’s Alabama-Kent State football game on the region.

One weekend in July, four Kent State players and a few athletic department officials came down to participate. One of them, senior running back Jacquise Terry, is from Phenix City, Ala., on the Georgia border. He played AAU basketball with Crimson Tide corner DeQuan Menzie.

“I have done Habitat before,” said Jacquise, who is minoring in construction management, “but I have never done it with players I compete with. That was the good part about it. We were able to put aside what we were about to do a month later and go in and help for a good cause. We fell right in together. They told us they appreciated us coming down. We bonded with those guys.”

Meteorologists all across the country are having questions today regarding the perceived over-hyping of Hurricane Irene. Leaving aside the discussion about whether or not Irene was over-hyped, and who might actually be to blame (spoiler-alert: It’s not the meteorologists…), comedian Dean Obeidallah offers a defense of meteorologists in his opinion piece titled “Don’t Mock the Weatherguy”

In short, Mr. Obeidallah offers this warning, “If we continue to mock these heroic weatherpeople who try to make our lives in a challenging world a little better, then don’t be surprised when, one day, we hear them collectively announce, ‘Enough!’” and leave the population “…like cavemen to predict weather based on the sounds of insects and our swollen feet.”

A lot has taken place the last few months and this has prevented me from being able to blog. Since my last post the United States has experienced a devastating tornado outbreak (27 April 2011 in the southeast), the deadliest tornado since 1947 (22 May 2011 in Joplin, MO), and a violent tornado outbreak in the more tradition area of Oklahoma (24 May 2011). What makes this year remarkable is the number of tornadoes that have hit heavily populated areas, which has contributed to the number of direct tornado fatalities being well over 500. It’s certainly been an emotional year for meteorologists. Also during my blogging hiatus, the National Severe Storms Laboratory and the Storm Prediction Center held another successful Experimental Forecast Program. The datasets generated will provide researchers ample opportunities for discovery.

This post is short, but serves to end my blogging drought. In the coming days, weeks, and months, I hope to share what’s been keeping me busy. Here’s to getting back into the habit of putting my thoughts in words.

Greg Carbin, Warning Coordination Meteorologist at the Storm Prediction Center (SPC), informed me today that he has updated the SPC tornado database up through 2010. Thus, in the coming days, I’ll updated the graphics to include the last 2 years worth of tornadoes. I look forward to playing with the updated data!

After spending a year using a website layout that I was not thrilled with, I’ve gone ahead and created a layout that I much prefer. One thing I really like is the slider at the top of the home page, which I will use to draw attention to “feature” articles. However, several people have complained that even on a fast Internet connection, the slider takes a while to load. I’ve tried some behind the scenes performance tweaks to try and speed things up. I’d appreciate feedback letting me know

1. what you think of the new design;
2. are you having any performance issues with the website; and
3. what type of internet connection are you using?

Tomorrow will begin the next chapter in the life cycle of the “Ramblings of a Graduate Student” blog! I hope this site will be more interactive in 2011 than 2010. Stay tuned!

As many readers know, in all my spare time I assist with the University of Oklahoma’s School of Meteorology’s Senior Synoptic Meteorology course. As a student of the atmosphere, I love being able to talk about and teach interesting facets of day-to-day weather. That’s part of why I started the 365 project!

One component of the Synoptic Meteorology curriculum is to improve students’ abilities to communicate with various audiences. One of the ways this is being done is through the use of student blogs. The Synoptic professor, Dr. Kevin Kloesel, and I will occasionally give the seniors a topic, typically a forecast problem, to discuss in a 500-words-or-less blog post. The first of these assignments was issued today regarding the upcoming southern plains precipitation event.

Please take a moment to read through some of the student’s blogs and leave comments regarding things you like, dislike, or take issue with. Again, part of this exercise is to have students work on taking complex meteorological information and convey it in such a manner that others can understand. Feel free to challenge them!

You can find the blog posts here: 2010 OU Senior Synoptic Blog. Each student has a unique username to allow readers to distinguish between authors.

For those who began following this blog because of the 365 weather project, this post may seem to be off topic – and it is. The thing is, I use this blog to give my thoughts on matters, in addition to finishing my 365 project. If you would rather I only stick to the weather, feel free to follow the 365 weather project directly, avoiding all other posts, by using this link instead of www.patricktmarsh.com

With that said, I have become a local expert of sorts regarding the use of social media stemming from my utilization of Facebook and Twitter for achieving my Snowshot of America project. (You can also read my blog posts on my Snowshot of America project by reading Day 42, Day 43, and Day 44 from the 365 weather project.) In fact, I’ve been asked to address the American Meteorological Society’s meeting of the AMS Education Resource Agents – a yearly training workshop for educators – on the use of social media and blogs to disseminate information about weather and climate. The overarching theme to take away from the snow project, and most likely my upcoming presentation, is that with the advent of social media, individual users, or even companies, cannot control “the message” once it enters the social media stream. For example, after posting my call for snow photographs on Twitter and Facebook, I did not even have time to alert the appropriate public relations personnel at my work before they were receiving media inquiries from all over the United States. Information dissemination occurs that fast.

What does all of that have to do with the twitter account mentioned in the title of this blog, @BPGlobalPR? This is the Twitter account of a satirical spoof of the public relation efforts of British Petroleum (BP). @BPGlobalPR has been relentless in its attack on BP’s response to the ecological disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico and is reaching an ever increasing audience. As of this writing, over 125,000 followers, including myself, read the funny, witty, and downright chilling posts that almost always appear to have some underlying element of truth to them.

The man behind the account released a statement yesterday explaining his motivation behind the account. I won’t repost the entire “press release” here, but I do want to touch on the advice “Leroy Stick” offers to anyone who thinks he or she can control “the message”:

So what is the point of all this? The point is, FORGET YOUR BRAND. You don’t own it because it is literally nothing. You can spend all sorts of time and money trying to manufacture public opinion, but ultimately, that’s up to the public, now isn’t it? [...] You know the best way to get the public to respect your brand? Have a respectable brand. Offer a great, innovative product and make responsible, ethical business decisions. Lead the pack! Evolve! [...]

So why is it that a simple graduate student in meteorology can learn this lesson, but major corporations with large public relation firms seem to be incapable of learning the same lesson? It is arrogance? Ignorance? Some combination of the two? Something else? I don’t know, and I don’t even have a good guess here. However, I do know that Mr. Stick’s press release should be required reading for anyone who ever wants to communicate to another human being again. (Warning: There is some profanity in the press release. However, in my opnion, it is still a must read.)

So, what does Mr. Stick think BP should do to end this PR nightmare?

Don’t send hundreds of temp workers to the gulf to put on a show for the President. Hire those workers to actually work! Don’t dump toxic dispersant into the ocean just so the surface looks better. Collect the oil and get it out of the water! Don’t tell your employees that they can’t wear respirators while they work because it makes for a bad picture. Take a picture of those employees working safely to fix the problem. Lastly, don’t keep the press and the people trying to help you away from the disaster, open it up so people can see it and help fix it. This isn’t just your disaster, this is a human tragedy. Allow us to mourn so that we can stop being angry.

I couldn’t have said it any better myself.