🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug4.191243.14699@kakwa.ucs.ualberta.ca>  
sherwood@fenris.space.ualberta.ca (Sherwood Botsford) writes:
> I agree with Mr. Keiffer's comment on overloading a weathermap service 
> site.
> 
> I would like to add a thought to anyone working on this.
> 
> Is it possible to get weather maps (Not satellite images) in Postscript 
> format?
> 
> Seems to be that weathermaps are starting life as a hoard of vectors 
> running toward a plotter.  This should make the maps much smaller, no?.
> 
> (The ideal of course, would be to get the weather bureau to publish them 
> as Postscript...)

(Running the risk again to be asked to supply data and/or programs I don't  
own and therefore can't give away :-)

The Member States (founders) of the European Centre for Medium-range  
Weather Forecasting mainly use the MAGICS library (supplied to them by  
ECMWF) to produce weather maps.  As MAGICS internally uses the Graphics  
Kernel System, most weather maps are GKS 'meta'files, i.e. device  
independent representations of the maps.  These meta-files consist of  
character information for text and poly-line floating point arrays for  
lines (contours, wind flags, coast lines, etc.), all coded as ASCII data.  
I wrote a previewer for this sort of meta-file under X - it's not very  
hard (barring the fact that X can't rotate or scale characters, so your  
contour labels won't follow said contour).  It can't be very hard to  
convert this file format to PostScript.  It could then simply be  
compressed, and - being a plain text file - would yield a nice compression  
factor too.

I don't know what the philosophy on distributing weather maps is in the  
USA, but here in Europe it is considered a profitable product, so it won't  
be distributed for free (I recently talked with the marketing departement  
of our institute *) about disseminating weather forecasts by e-mail - It  
will not be done, because the fees are not recoverable).

*) KNMI, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute.
--
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