grads

GrADS

Javascript-based GrADS (Grid Analysis and Display System) Data Server client. Primarily an API for accessing weather forecast/climate data for a location or area. Currently, acccesses a few GFS variables but working to include the majority of human-usable variables (do you care about surface flux or gravity wave stuff? I don't!)

Note: while this application does provide access to very detailed and useful weather/climate metrics in a very pragmatic way, please do not use it to provide on-demand weather data to end users. It makes a request to NOAA for every variable, every time you need to access it, minus a short cache of previously directed variables. Weather Underground provides a more suitable API for this purpose. This application was intended for modelling and research purposes only.

Applications & Implementation ideas:

• (originally) trajectory prediction for weather balloons & payloads
• Access weather conditions via forecast (weather model, not sensors) for nearly any point on planet.
• Access wave conditions for a majority of the water on the planet (weather model, not sensors)
• Visualize weather conditions for an entire country at once. Quite interesting seeing this on poorer countries.
• Potientally create a forecast broadcast system for small countries with a small decoding device.

GrADS is a beast of a server to access. I've worked on this code for several years now and finally am comfortable that I'm doing it right.

Usage

Coming soon!

Basically:

var grads = new Grads( lat, lon, alt(m) );

grads.fetch('temperature', function( values, config ) {
    var tempInKelvin = values[0][0][0];
});

TODO

This is based off some code I wrote years ago so it's pretty simple for now. Eventually, it'd be nice to have the following features:

• Working/selectable time ranges
• Auto-selection of most "valuable" model

In the Future

Some cool data for the intended use case (physics simulation) would be to implement the following available datasets (from http://ruc.noaa.gov/rr/RAP_var_diagnosis.html) -

• Vertical Velocity

Notes

* I'm not sure if this breaks a NOAA "term of service".