31 October 2006

Many of you are probably familiar with Jack Glendening's BlipMap
( http://drjack.info/ ) forecasts. Recently he has developed a new
BlipMap implementation called Regional Atmospheric Soaring Prediction
(RASP, see http://drjack.info/RASP/ ).

Instead of calculating various soaring performance parameters from the
output of the NCEP ETA weather model (which employs a 12 km resolution
grid), RASP uses the NCEP initialization data to start a local WRF
model run using higher resolution grids. DrJack has made all the
programs necessary for someone to get this up and running for their
own region freely available.

This means that anyone with access to the necessary computational
power can generate high resolution BlipMaps for their local flying
sites.  I have implemented RASP for a section of southern California
including Santa Barbara. The region is bordered by Pt. Conception on
the west, Channel Islands on the south, LA on the east, and the
Central Valley to the north. It is intended mainly for Santa Barbara
and Ventura County hang gliding & paragliding sites. I have set up 4
km and 1.3 km grids, and run each twice daily for 06Z and 12Z
initialization data.  Soundings are available for three launch
sites. Currently the soundings are in skewT/logP format. (Hint: 700 mb
~ 10000 ft, and the curved brown lines are dry adiabats.)

It is relatively easy to get RASP up and going locally if you have a
reasonably fast Linux box and are a good command line Unix
user. Familiarity with perl and html are not essential but extremely
helpful. A complete coarse + fine Santa Barbara WRF run requires
about 2.2 hours on a dual 2.8 GHz Xeon server running Gentoo Linux.

Coarse (4 km) grid forecasts for the Santa Barbara region are now
available daily at about 0100 PST for 06Z initialization data and 0700
PST for 12Z data. Fine (1.3 km grid) forecasts are available at about
0215 PST for 06Z initialization data and 0815 PST for 12Z data. 12Z
initialized runs are more accurate because they incorporate more
recent data, such as the 12Z RAOB soundings.

The main web page is http://topaflyers.com/RASP/SANTABARB/

I also have an alternative user interface ("univiewer") working for
it at http://topaflyers.com/RASP/UNIVIEWER/univiewer.html

I intend to continue doing twice daily Santa Barbara runs for the 
indefinite future.

Don Taber
dtaber@topaflyers.com