RASP BlipMaps for Santa Barbara region

[dtaber]

Many of you are probably familiar with Jack Glendening's BlipMap
( http://drjack.info/ ) forecasts. Recently he has developed a new
BlipMap implementation called Regional Atmospheric Soaring Prediction
(RASP, see http://drjack.info/RASP/ ).

Instead of calculating various soaring performance parameters from the
output of the NCEP ETA weather model (which employs a 12 km resolution
grid), RASP uses the NCEP initialization data to start a local WRF
model run using higher resolution grids. DrJack has made all the
programs necessary for someone to get this up and running for their
own local region freely available.

I have implemented RASP for a section of southern California including
Santa Barbara. The region is bordered by Pt. Conception on the west,
Channel Islands on the south, LA on the east, and the Central Valley
to the north. It is intended mainly for Santa Barbara and Ventura
County hang gliding & paragliding sites. I have set up 4 km and 1.3 km
grids, and run each twice daily for 06Z and 12Z initialization data.
Soundings are available for three launch sites. Currently the soundings
are in skewT/logP format. (Hint: 700 mB ~ 10000 ft, and the solid green
lines are dry adiabats.)

It is relatively easy to get RASP up and going locally if you have a
reasonably fast Linux box and are a good command line Unix
user. Familiarity with perl and html are not essential but extremely
helpful. A complete coarse + fine Santa Barbara WRF run requires
about 2.2 hours on a dual 2.8 GHz Xeon server running Gentoo Linux.

Coarse (4 km) grid forecasts are available daily at about 0100 PST for
06Z initialization data and 0700 PST for 12Z data. Fine (1.3 km grid)
forecasts are available at about 0215 PST for 06Z initialization data
and 0815 PST for 12Z data. 12Z initialized runs are more accurate
because they incorporate more recent data, such as the 12Z RAOB
soundings.

The main web page is http://topaflyers.com/RASP/SANTABARB/

I also have an alternative user interface ("univiewer") working for
it at http://topaflyers.com/RASP/UNIVIEWER/univiewer.html

Don Taber
dtaber@topaflyers.com

[oj]

Thanks for doing this Don! I've always had a hard time reading the Blipmaps in detail near the coast due to the resolution. I could pick out Pine but the front range was always just a guess. I also like the looping feature, it gives us a history and prediction for thermal activity in detail that I've never seen. This is a great addition to our soaring forcasts.