I’m happy to announce that my article “Near Real Time Weather and Ocean Model Data Access with rNOMADS” was recently accepted for publication in the journal Computers & Geosciences. The editor has kindly provided me with a link to the article that’s free until late April, check it out here.  I’m excited to have the package published somewhere official and I’m looking forward to seeing who ends up using it.

In other news, I’m still waiting for the tropospheric jet to point anywhere besides East so we can launch a tracked, camera bearing solar balloon from Chapel Hill.   I wrote an rNOMADS script that generates wind profiles from the 0600 GMT model run on today’s date out to three days from now, and put it on my computer’s crontab.  Every day, I look at the winds, and wait.  Here’s the profiles for today, let’s see if it updates daily on wordpress too:

Wind profiles above Chapel Hill, NC, USA

You can have a look at the script that generates this image here.

Note that the “montage” system command uses the Ubuntu imagemagick package to combine separate PNGs.  If you’re on windows or mac, this will not work for you.