GEMPAK (also known as NAWIPS) is a powerful product used to generate your own weather maps. While it is tedious to learn (VERY TEDIOUS), it is very rewarding in the end. You have the ability to create maps similar to those used by meteorologist in the field, as well as using your creative minds to generate something different.
Over the past few weeks I have begun testing gempak on our cyclone server here at Plymouth State. Above is an 850 hPa map showing colors of temperature (°C), lines of geopotential height, and wind barbs in knots. I have made a few other maps as well, and they can be seen on my map wall.
The scripts i used to make these maps are run 4 times a day, via cron, to coordinate with the GFS runs at 00,06,12, and 18Z. It first loads the Gempak NTS files created via the gempak program GDPLOT3, the script will then readjust the time and then create maps in 6 hour intervals. Before the script is run, another script is envoked to remove the previous images.
One of my goals over the next few weeks is to beef up my map wall. So far I only have 3 products:
- 850mb Heights/Temps/Winds
- Surface 6-Hour Precip
- 700mb Vort/Q-Vectors/1000-500mb Thickness
The third one is a little tricky to explain, and it is not fully completed yet, so stay tuned.
Once again, sorry for the lack of posting. Turns out Graduate School requires me to do ACTUAL work (more on this later)
But for now, take a gander at this picture:
This is the 18Z Surface analysis, and it just so happens to catch Hurricane Ike. Even though it looks like you want to shoot at it with a Remington 22, it is actually lines of constant pressure (known as isobars). The tighter the lines are, the stronger the system is.
According to the National Hurricane Center, the storm is is moving WNW at 10mph and has max sustained winds of 100 mph. Models indicate that the storm will make landfall in Texas sometime tomorrow night.
If I am not mistaken, this should be the first severe weather watch for New England this year. It was just issued by the storm prediction center a few minutes ago, as a strong surface cold front has entered a region of slightly unstable conditions.
Supercells have already appeared on radar over the Hudson river valley moving SSEward.
I would have posted this earlier, but I was attending the Northeast Storm conference, where I was presenting my Oklahoma Research for the last time.
Friday night around 1:40Z, a possible tornado touched down in the downtown Atlanta area. It caused some damage to the Georgia Dome and the CNN building (Source: SPC).
Looking at the 00Z sounding for Atlanta (KFFC) to the left, there appears to be little support for tornadoes. The surface based CAPE is low, and there is very limited low level wind shear. However, the helicity and thermodynamic values (SW, LI, SI) were strong enough to possibly produce a tornado in the downtown area.
Saturday however was the bigger event day, as 41 tornadoes and 75 hail events were reported in the southeastern part of the United States.
