grib-renderer

Node GFS GRIB Renderer

This project is a thin wrapper around Jimp and grib2json which simplifies writing GRIB visualisations in pure JS.

There's not much practical use for this, but it's a nice and visual way to get into GRIB processing.

Speed

Because all of the maths and image manipulation happens in JavaScript land, this is not particularly fast. Jimp is by design JavaScript only (ahem slow). This does however mean the image generation could be done in the browser.

Interesting Parts

GRIBs are hard, I made this as a way of better understanding how GRIB visualisation tools work and why they are the way they are.

If you're learning about GRIB visualisation, I'd recommend you look at these parts of code:

const newXCoord = ((xCoord + 180) % 360) - 180; 

GFS Grib files' Latitudes by default start where we mere mortals might expect to be the center of the map. It's necessary to wrap our co-ordinates if we're to render a normal looking map.

Usage

import * as path from 'path';
import { makeMap } from 'grib-renderer';
import grib2json from 'grib2json';

const worldBBox = <any>[-180, 90, 180, -90];

grib2json('./gfs.t06z.pgrb2.0p25.f000', { // LAND
    scriptPath: './grib2json-0.8.0-SNAPSHOT/bin/grib2json',
    names: true,
    data: true,
    category: 0,
    parameter: 218,
    surfaceType: 1,
    surfaceValue: 0,
}, function (err, landGrib) {
    if (err) return console.error(err);
    else {
        const landLayer = {
            grib: landGrib[0],
            getPixel: (value) => {
                let red = 0,
                    green = 0,
                    blue = 0,
                    alpha = 255;

                if (value === 0) { // Sea
                    red = 203;
                    green = 223;
                    blue = 218;
                    alpha = 255;
                }

                return [red, green, blue, alpha];
            }
        };

        makeMap([landLayer], worldBBox)
            .then((img) => {
                img.write('./out.png');
                console.info('Written to file [./out.png]')
            })
            .catch(err => console.error(err));
    }
});

Example

The example in example/example.ts was used to generate the image above (example.png). It defines a function called makeTemperatureMap which loads two separate parameters from the same GRIB file. Once the files are loaded, 3 layers are defined and passed into makeMap.

You can execute the native TypeScript example using ts-node:

> ts-node ./example/example.ts

Dependencies

• grib2json (https://github.com/cambecc/grib2json)
• Valid GFS GRIB file
• NodeJS

> # Download Grib2JSON (see https://github.com/cambecc/grib2json)
> # Download a Grib File (see https://github.com/ISNIT0/gfs-scraper)
> npm i
> npm i -g typescript

Building

> tsc

License

MIT