To the best of my knowledge, all the weather related programs currently
available for Linux are either very simple and provide little
meteorological information or are huge, ancient, or proprietary beasts
created for the National Weather Service. AWeather is made to fill the
gap by providing lots of weather information while still using standard
free software practices. As such, the research focus of this software
is weather, not creative way to write software.
Intended Features
High quality data sources
(Level-II archive, etc)
3D Volume browser (todo)
GTK+ User Interface
API for algorithms
(vortex/hail signatures, rain-rate, etc)
(todo)
Other?
Status
Now that it's spring again, progress on AWeather is continuing.
Additional data sources (watch/warning boxes, surface data, etc)
Animation
<% } %>
<% void print_news(void) { %>
2011-06-13
Started work on this new website. Lots of progress in AWeather as well:
Merged support for isosurfaces to the main branch (Finally!)
Added an option to automatically refresh after a timeout
New fullscreen mode
2010-05-17
AWeather 0.4.1:
Win32 fixes and improved debug support
Fix bug with daylight savings time
Function to clear old cache entries
2010-05-14
AWeather 0.4:
Conus radar images
Multiple radars support
Gentoo, Ubuntu, MS Windows and source packages are available
2009-11-09
AWeather 0.3.0 released, based on libgis but still rather
buggy.
2009-10-24
AWeather 0.2.3 (maintenance release).
Added a Application menu entry and a few build/runtime fixes.
2009-09-02
The source repository has been migrated to Git. A lot of
progress is being made on libgis, which is now able to display
a virtual globe using data from NASA servers.
AWeather provides consistent user interface that allows the
user to zoom in from a high level view of the entire Earth down
to regional and microscale views.
<% print_screen("synop"); %>
High level view using grits
<% print_screen("region"); %>
Regional view of a storm front
<% print_screen("meso"); %>
Mesoscale view of a tornadic system
<% print_screen("iso"); %>
Close up showing a 52.5 dBZ isosurface
<% } %>
<% void print_download(void) { %>
Stable release
While AWeather won't be considered stable until version 1.0,
these are as close to stable as you can get until then
AWeather has direct dependencies on Grits, and RSL, among other things.
Currently building AWeather will require the exact same version of
Grits to be installed, but this may change in the near future as
the software stabilizes.
Architecture Overview
Built on top of GObject and GTK+
Uses the Grits "Virtual Globe" library for much of the graphics work.
Grits also provides some other generic functionality and a plugin API.
AWeather itself is a front-end for grits along with a
bundle of weather related plugins.
<% } %>
<% void print_grits(void) { %>
Grits
Grits is a Virtual Globe library developed along side AWeather, but
can be used by other programs as well.
It is differentiated from other Virtual Globes such as Google Earth,
NASA World Wind, and KDE Marble in that it is developed as a library
that is used by other programs, such as AWeather, rather than
providing a user interface that is used directly.
<% print_screen("grits"); %>
Grits without any plugins
<% print_screen("plugins"); %>
Satellite and Environment plugins
<% print_screen("terrain"); %>
Elevation plugin showing a mountain
AWeather is designed to be an advanced weather program which is
designed to be used by weather enthusiasts. AWeather is not
another weather dockapp that simply displays a pre-computed
forecast. It is designed to be an easy to use program that
integrates a variety of weather data in simple unified
interface; see features for more details.