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Hurricane Tools

This is a collection of simple tools for tracking and reporting on hurricanes, released by GateHouse Media LLC. The getspaghetti program is intended to be run as a cron job/scheduled task long before you think you might need it.

Installation

Clone or download the repo. With a functioning Python 3, use pip install -r requirements.txt or whatever your toolchain requires. No specific versions are required, and dependencies are quite limited.

Files

getspaghetti.py -- Fetch and save KML and GIF versions of hurricane spaghetti model plots from the South Florida Water Management District. Some configuration may be required at the top of the file.

getspaghetti.sh is a sample program that makes it easier to call from a cron job; you'll want to configure the path to these program files and possibly the path to your Python 3 installation, particularly for Mac users.

windprobabilitynames.py is just a way to prettify the names the National Weather Service kicks out in its wind probability forecasts. Setting the prettified name to "badstuff" will drop the entry entirely. When new locations are added to the forecasts, you'll want to add them to this file. Pull requests gratefully accepted, as this is missing many entries for Gulf of Mexico and all of the Pacific storms.

Note: Some of these names contain accent marks (and others are missing them). Some web servers may have a problem with this; in Apache, edit /etc/apache2/apache2.conf and add the line

AddDefaultCharset utf-8

windprobabilities.py is a stupidly simple tool to scrape National Weather Service wind probability forecasts and turn them into something vaguely English. Configure at the top of the file to set your current storm's wind probability forecast URL and the output filename. What does it do? It generates stuff like this:

West Palm Beach, Fla.: 95% chance of 39+ mph; 74% chance of 57+ mph; 53% chance of 74+ mph

from this ungodly mess, with all-caps fractional location names, wind speeds in knots, and the most important number at the very end a large set of numbers:

W PALM BEACH 34 X X( X) 1( 1) 5( 6) 62(68) 22(90) 5(95)

W PALM BEACH 50 X X( X) X( X) X( X) 32(32) 33(65) 9(74)

W PALM BEACH 64 X X( X) X( X) X( X) 13(13) 30(43) 10(53)

windnames-for-all.ipynb is a derivative of windprobabilities, which checks for active storms and automatically generates an HTML version of the wind probabilities file in something that's somewhat more understandable than the official godawful mess. This is intended to be used as a cron job, an automatically scheduled thing. It's been stable.

animatedorian.sh -- Another simple example that stacks GIFs saved by getspaghetti into an animated GIF. You'd need the common tool ImageMagick for the actual processing. See the code for examples on how to build your own.

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Hurricane tools to track and report on storms' paths, spaghetti models and forecast wind speeds

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