Help-MesoWest Surface Weather Map Overlays

MesoWest Surface Weather Map Overlays

Comments and suggestions to improve MesoWest displays and access to data are encouraged and can be sent to meteo-mesowest@lists.utah.edu.

MesoWest Surface Weather Maps provide access in a convenient and visually inutitive way to current and retrospective surface weather data stored in the MesoWest database. The most recent observations within a specified time frame ending at a specific time are displayed (the default setting is the most recent observation at each station within the past hour, but the user can view conditions back to January 1997 within time windows of 15 minutes to 12 hours).

The Weather Overlays

A variety of graphical overlays for current and retrospective (since January 2007) conditions are now available:

A NEXRAD radar composite graphic from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet The graphics are updated 12 times per hour.

Hourly Real Time Mesoscale Analysis (RTMA) precipitation overlays from NCEP. More info

Experimental RTMA analyses of temperature, dew point temperature, and wind speed. More Info. More graphics. Only the test parallel analyses are displayed here.

GEOMAC active fire perimeters, NESDIS manual analyses of fire hot spots and smoke. More info

NWS warnings, watches, and advisories. More info

Synchronizing MesoWest Observations and Weather Overlays

The most current radar overlay and MesoWest observations at roughly the same time will be displayed automatically. Because of their experimental nature and our processing cycle, RTMA graphics are available roughly 75 minutes past the valid time. To synchronize any of the overlays with observations, use the "Time Options" to select a prior time (be sure to deselect the "Auto Current Time" check box). To examine the data likely to be in the RTMA analyses, show data in the past 24 minutes beginning at 12 minutes past the hour and restrict the time window to those observations available prior to 15 minutes past the hour (use a value for Restrict Time Window of 3 minutes).

Caveats

RTMA overlays are available at the top of the hour only. Our software does not check to see if the user selected time is consistent with the available overlays.
For consistency with the mapserver software, the RTMA grids at roughly 5.6 km resolution have been resampled to a .066 latitude/longitude grid (roughly 7 km spacing).