Wind Data Tags for Search & Rescue

[Budgie]

Brian,

I have a wee project that I hope you can help with.
My day job is as a Coastguard in a Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre and part of the job involves creating search areas at sea when looking for missing people or vessels.
We use software to assist with creating these search areas and it involves tidal data, wind data and other aspects like how different targets move in given wind & tide conditions.

It’s the wind data that I’d like to supply from my station but it has to be in a specific format, fortunately this format is used in a number of countries so it may be useful for other users as well.

Basically we use the average wind speed (knots) and direction in 6 hour blocks through the 24 hour period.
Times are all in UTC and it’s a six hour average as follows:

The 0000Z average uses data from 2100Z to 0259Z.
The 0600Z average uses data from 0300Z to 0859Z.
The 1200Z average uses data from 0900Z to 1459Z.
The 1800Z average uses data from 1500Z to 2059Z.

The data will look something like this:

Date Time Dir Sp 11-22-2012 1800Z 220 15 11-22-2012 1200Z 202 21 11-22-2012 0600Z 194 20 11-22-2012 0000Z 175 19

There’s an example of what I want to create HERE, but I’m only looking at the wind data.

As the times are specific for each block then I’m not sure how the tags will work and the data will need to be for, at least, the previous 4 days (16 blocks) and it’ll need to include Date, Time, Wind Speed and Wind Direction.

Do you think this is possible?

No rush on it, this is an “as time permits” project.

Thanks,
Martin.

[windy2]

I have added this, for testing, to a new .zip update, ready now…
see under setup , advanced/misc , bottom of the main program setup screen…
and click on the create now…and see how the output file looks…in the web files folder…
speed is in kts

[Budgie]

You’re a star.

I’ll download and have a look tonight.

[windy2]

note that rather than custom tags, its a text file, searchandresuce.txt (which I will get to be auto created and uploaded once we know its working as expected)
e.g, my test output
Date Time Dir Sp
11-29-2012 1800Z 141 1.2
11-29-2012 1200Z 249 0.4
11-29-2012 0600Z 335 0.3
11-30-2012 0000Z 147 2.0

[Budgie]

A text file is fine, Brian, as I can just use a PHP “include” to add the data to a page. :thumbright:

[windy2]

thats what I thought
what update interval should it be?

[Budgie]

Once every 6 hours should do the trick, maybe after the last average period so maybe:
03:00
09:00
15:00
21:00

[Budgie]

Downloaded the latest zip and created a new page (http://www.hebwx.co.uk/wxsar.php).
I need to parse the txt file to get it to read correctly as it displays all in one line at the moment.

There are a couple of things that need altering:

1. The wind speed only needs to be to the nearest whole knot, no decimal place required.
2. When I created the first data it gave the date as 12-30-1899, times and wind data are fine.
3. There’s a wee spelling correction for the file name, it’s currently “searchandresucedate.txt”.

Ref the create/upload times above, I had another think and on-the-hour is obviously not so good so maybe make it something like:
03:12
09:12
15:12
21:12
Just so as not to conflict with anything else.

Cheers,
Martin.

[windy2]

try another .zip update
file name is fixed
and it will auto create and upload a couple of minutes after the 6 hour UTC times

I have not changed the windspeed decimal yet though

[Budgie]

I’ll leave it running over night to give it time to create & upload a few times.
At the moment the file name seems to be the same, although there’s not been a auto create yet, and the date is still displayed as 12-30-1899.

[Budgie]

No auto updates/uploads over night so I re-downloaded the zip and the dates seem better, they now read:
1-12-2012 1800Z 353 11.0
1-12-2012 1200Z 281 1.5
1-13-2012 0600Z 336 12.9
1-13-2012 0000Z 343 12.6

Will have to wait and see if there’s any change to the auto create/upload. I’m nightshift tonight so I’ll check it again tomorrow.