Upgrades around Oct. 27

During this weekend I managed to set up a more complete version of Weachart for both languages. Some functions are still under test -- take note of them in the "brief instructions". I'll continue to fix the bugs in the following days, and write some minor functions for the whole site to remove the "test" string -- it was said to be "1-month" since July 20!

Meanwhile I'm doing a "database correction campaign" as I notice many cracks from it while some of you are trying to access some locations. That's caused by the difference from NGA database and FIPS 10-4, they are supposed to be matched but obviously something was wrong at the NGA side. I hope the access problems will be much reduced after next weekend -- I'll keep track of them.

Quanzhi

Upgrades as of Oct. 19

It has been another hard-working weekend, and the complete site database is finally released (with US data included). Meanwhile I received a warning from the server administrator -- I made a mistake in the site data conversion loop and this leads to slow execute speed of the entire server.

Except the database refine, no significant upgrade has been done over this weekend, I devote most of time on fixing the bugs of Weachart, I'm nearly there -- if tonight's run doesn't bring out problems, I'll start to do some clean-up work, and public test is expected to begin before Oct. 27 (I'd better take more time on study in weekdays ~_~).

Failure on Oct. 18 12Z/18Z's run

My apologize to you all about the data updating failure at 12Z/18Z's run. That's caused by a control file fatal error, and it's now fixed. Things are expected to be normal at Oct. 19 00Z's run.

[10月15日]晴天钟近况

　　同时兼顾两种语言真是麻烦，而问题是诸位懂英语，而老外不懂中文…… 哎，但为了各位阅读便利，因此还是要叙述一下最近的更新项目。

　　最近收到国内外许多朋友的来信，大多数是对晴天钟的赞赏，也提出了很多中肯的建议，值得注意的是有几位国内气象界老师（哎，敝人现在还在混学士学位呢，当然要尊称老师啦）的来信，提出了许多建议，敝人在此对深表谢意。做这些东西要耗费许多时间，有的时候还是挺枯燥，因此您的支持是最巨大的动力！

　　最近一共更新了三个项目：

1. APanel加上了lon/lat选项，这对于某些精细地形的预报会有帮助，但我没有把它拓展到中文版，因为国内好象也很少人使用这一功能；

2. 把俄罗斯的地点数据加上了，美国的也即将加上；

3. 天气图功能现在一直在调试，因此各位使用的时候很可能会有不少问题，敬请谅解。待调试完成以后，还将有许多预测参数会加上，相信对气象方面的老师及朋友会有更大帮助。

　　若有任何问题，可在此留言（留言需要本人审核，因此不能马上看见，请原谅），或给我发邮件：tom6740 [at] gmail.com。再次谢谢各位支持！

Site data for U.S.

Just another message for our U.S. friends that the conversion is in progress. As the data is too big (~260M -- more than 3 times bigger than the second biggest country file!), the procedure takes quite long.

Upgrades around Oct. 13

Dear all,

During these days, I received dozen of emails with praises and encourages. Thank you for your all! As programing is a tire work and sometimes boring, your support is one of the *most* important things!

Recently I have made (or will be made very soon) some upgrades of the system which you may have noted. They are

1) enhancement of APanel lon/lat function. I have received some complaints, include several old users, about the error of APanel. That's because the resolution of GFS is not high enough. If the surrounding on altitude of your site is "flat" enough, you may not suffer from this problem. However, if you are on a peak that is significantly higher than your surroudings, you may find that the forecast is far from satisfied, as the grid of GFS is 35x35km and the data is about an average of a 35x35km region around you. To fix this problem, a new parameter named "Altitude Correction" is introduced. This only takes effect on lon/lat query method, for those who are selecting site from database, Altitude Correction does not works.

2) Complete version of site data. In the former version, the site of Russia and U.S. was not included without a note, and I should apologize for those who came from these two countries. For site data of Russia, the raw data from NGA is far too big (~84M) and the conversion loop cannot work on it; For U.S., that's because it uses the data from USGS, not NGA, and the format is different. Thus, I have to wrote another special conversion loop for it. The two loops are written today, and the conversion is now on process. If all goes right then the site file of the two countries will be added early tomorrow.

3) "Weachart" product (provide meteorological charts for a great variety elements) is now under partial test and is only available to Chinese users. There are a number of guys from weather bureau put some good words on it and I'm on bug fixes and model refines. However I met some obstacles with difficulties to go over it and I cannot give an exact date of when can it be okay for a public test.

Okay... so much for this. I've a few lines more to write but now I should go to sleep now.

Happy using!

Quanzhi