Weather Plot displays METARs, guidance and current and past forecasts in form of a time series. This dialog is invoked by selecting Plot in the TAF Monitor GUI.

Weather Plot

Ceiling, visibility and winds are plotted as separate graphs. The horizontal axis in each graph represents time, the current time approximately centered in the display. The number of hours past and in the future is configurable. The ticks on the vertical axes for ceiling and visibility are the significant thresholds defined separately for each TAF site.

For each forecast period, ceiling and visibilities are represented by a tuple (low, high) values, and plotted as a shaded rectangle. Thus such a rectangle indicates existence of a TEMPO or PROB30 group. Only prevailing winds are plotted.

To plot data for a site, select the TAF id from the Site ID menu. This will display all data selected in the Data Sources area. Currently available data sources are: TAFs, METARs, ETA-MOS, NGM-MOS, GFS-MOS, NAM-WRF-Profile. Depending on the configuration at your WFO, only a subset may visible. However TAF and METARs buttons should always be present. By default, the most recent data is displayed.

If you want to plot previous forecast or guidance, select the Times button. A dialog displaying available data will be shown.

Time Selector

Click on the arrow on the right to show all available issuance times, select desired time, then press the Display in the main window. The Reset button resets all choices to the most recent time.

During changing weather conditions, the reporting frequency of METAR observations may be high, making the display, particularily wind plot, very "busy". In such case you may want to zoom the display, from the zoom menu select zoom factor, then press the Display. This button redraws the display and may be used when new observations are received, as the display is not automatically refreshed.

To save the graphs, use the Print button. By default, this will create a JPEG image in the /awips/adapt/avnfps/OB8.3/tmp directory. The WxPlot's Print command to run is located in the etc/wxplot.cfg file under the [print] tag. The '%s' wildcard--expanded to the identifier in the Site ID text field--in the command line string is optional. Thus, if you wanted the Print button to send the image directly to the printer, the command line string could be changed to this:

[print]
cmd=convert - -size 600x1000 jpg:- | lpr -o landscape
        

See Section 2.1, “Files in etc” and refer to the etc/wxplot.cfg section for more details.