Ondas specification
nbsp is compliant with the Open Nexrad Data Access Specification, which aims to make the raw radar data available to clients in a conventional manner. This means that, by default, nbsp creates a directory layout and provides the infrastructure to support services and clients that have adopted this specification, such as Digital Atmosphere and GRLevel3 The corresponding URL for our system is
http://www.opennoaaport.net/digatmos/nexradwhich is open for testing purposes, and users of the Digital Atmosphere and GRlevel3 programs can already use.
This service requires the presence of a directory listing file dir.list in each radar site subdirectory of the base URL, and in addition a global, static configuration file config.cfg in the base directory (i.e., the digatmos/nexrad directory in the above example). nbsp will create the dir.list files and update them automatically as new radar data files are received. The config.cfg must be created and moved to its apropriate location manually. A sample file is provided in the nbsp documentation directory which can be just copied to its final destination.
GRLevel3 support
As mentioned elsewhere in this document, nbsp has a built-in web server that listens for connections on port 8015. Among other things, it allows to support the PC application grlevel3 out of the box if your nbsp computer and your PC are networked. In the grlevel3 program, the relevant URL to use is
http://server:8015/digatmos/nexradfor the radar data server, and
http://server:8015/digatmos/warningsfor the warning server, where server should be replaced by the correct name of the nbsp computer.
DA support
Digital Atmosphere (DA) is supported in similar fashion. For example, the surface data can be retrieved by using the URL
http://server:8015/digatmos/surface/20@Y@M@D@H.saoin the configuration dialog box, and similarly with the other data types, substituting for server the appropriate name of the nbsp server machine.
Weatherscope support
Weatherscope is a client application available from the Oklahoma Climatological Survey. To enable the weatherscope support in Nbsp, a set of files must be installed in the server and another set of weatherscope-client files must be installed in the clients.
The Nbsp distribution comes with the weatherscope-extension package that contains the relevant files and installation instructions. In short, the procedure reduces to define a few settings in a configuration file, and then execute a make script to create the two sets of files, one of which is to be installed in the server and the other one must be distributed to the clients. The client simply unzips a zip file and copy the contents to an appropriate location in the client computer.
After the installation, a ``Noaaport data'' item will appear in the various menus, for importing nids files to create radar images or metar data files for surface plots and time graphs. The screenshots in the samples section illustrate some of these features.