BowEcho v0.34.5

BowEcho v0.34.5

This release is a substantial reliability, performance, and automation update.
Warning polygons remain usable in dense coastal scenes, live alerts reach the
map sooner, several long-standing operational-overlay issues are fixed, hidden
workspaces stop consuming resources, and BowEcho gains reproducible radar,
satellite, and WRF command-line workflows built on the same production paths as
the desktop app.

Feedback fixes since v0.34.4

• Keyboard navigation is substantially expanded: [/] or Page Up/Page Down
  step frames, Home resets the map view, End jumps to the newest frame, and
  Shift+X arms or disarms the cross-section tool. The in-app Guide lists the
  shortcuts.
• Cross sections can now pop out into their own resizable window, return to the
  bottom panel, and reopen without losing completed endpoints.
• Placefile Source range, 2x, 4x, 8x, and Unlimited choices remain usable
  instead of making the placefile section disappear.
• Clicking a new-alert card preserves the selected warning type and sort.
  Rotation-track and TDS visibility also persist across restarts, and SPC
  tornado-risk fills are easier to see.
• WoFS follows the displayed radar time, supports working previous/next frame
  controls, and discovers newer cycles during the day instead of remaining
  stuck on one frame.
• Disabled sweep cuts stay disabled while stepping through radar frames.
• Current-year Tornado Tracks use preliminary NOAA NCEI paths until the annual
  SPC file is published, and archive reloads preserve the user's map center and
  zoom.
• FARM drapes keep their native quicklook resolution. Covered dock tabs and
  closed science surfaces suspend unnecessary FARM, WoFS, VWP, 3-D volume,
  observation, tropical, and Hurricane Hunter work, then resume from retained
  state when shown again.
• Floating windows have configurable accent colors, and nested native model
  plots retain the correct selected field.

Warnings and live alerts

• Dense warning scenes no longer switch every fill off at one zoom level and
  suddenly rebuild them all at another. Fills now stay enabled independently of
  warning count while sharing bounded geometry budgets; exact source geometry
  remains available for outlines and hit testing.
• Same-family warning overlaps are flattened to avoid artificially dark fill
  blobs. Different families still layer independently, so overlapping flood,
  tropical-storm, hurricane, tornado, and severe-thunderstorm warnings retain
  their own colors and fills.
• Coastline-heavy NWS zone polygons receive a bounded fill-only mesh instead of
  losing their fill. A live tropical-cyclone proof retained all 62 polygon
  components across 27 referenced zones, including source rings with more than
  4,000 points.
• The global warning Fill control now clears only per-family fill-alpha
  overrides. Setting Fill to zero takes effect immediately without resetting
  custom colors, widths, or dash patterns, and it bypasses fill construction
  work entirely.
• Live alert startup is staged. Direct-geometry Tornado, Severe Thunderstorm,
  and Flash Flood Warnings are published first; any priority zone geometry is
  resolved next; remaining watches, floods, tropical products, and other
  supported families continue loading afterward with bounded parallel zone
  requests.
• Official VTEC tropical products are classified separately: TR/TI are
  Tropical Storm Warnings, while HU/HI/TY/HF are Hurricane or Typhoon
  Warnings. They have independent filters and blue/magenta defaults instead of
  falling through to a generic yellow alert or being confused with overlapping
  coastal-flood polygons.
• Zone-based tropical alerts retain every affected geometry component under
  one canonical VTEC event. Archive and live paths also share the same
  supported-family filtering, removing generic Alert flashes and cards.
• Opening a newly issued alert no longer resets the current warning type filter
  or sort order.
• SPC tornado-risk fills use a stronger default opacity while preserving user
  style overrides.

Operational overlays and timelines

• Placefile visibility range choices remain open and selectable. Choosing
  Source range, 2x, 4x, 8x, or Unlimited no longer makes the placefile section
  disappear.
• Rotation-track and TDS visibility settings persist across restarts. Recent
  accumulated storm and rotation tracks also use bounded local caches so a
  restart does not discard useful recent history.
• Tornado Tracks fills the current-year gap with preliminary NOAA NCEI Storm
  Events paths until SPC publishes the consolidated annual WCM file.
• WoFS follows the actual displayed radar time instead of remaining on a stale
  frame. Previous/next controls move through posted WoFS minutes in both
  directions, and the live catalog can discover newer cycles during the day.
• Disabling individual sweep cuts now remains in effect while stepping backward
  or forward through frames instead of resetting on every frame change.
• FARM map drapes retain the native quicklook crop instead of using the former
  half-resolution copy.
• Reloading archive frames preserves the current map center and zoom instead of
  recentering on the radar domain.

Workspace, controls, and background performance

• Cross sections can move between the existing resizable bottom panel and a
  separate resizable floating window. Completed sections can be reopened
  without clearing their endpoints.
• Added direct keyboard navigation: bracket or Page Up/Page Down frame
  stepping, Home to reset the map view, End to jump to the newest timeline
  frame, and Shift+X to arm or disarm the cross-section tool. The in-app Guide
  documents the expanded shortcuts.
• Floating-window outlines, active title bars, and restrained surface tint now
  share a configurable accent under Appearance. Reset follows the active theme
  or Brand Kit accent.
• Covered dock tabs and closed presentation surfaces stop starting unnecessary
  VWP, 3-D volume, FARM, WoFS, observation, tropical, and Hurricane Hunter
  work. Visible map drapes still receive the minimum work they need, and
  completed background rasters explicitly wake the UI.
• FARM and WoFS resume from their retained playheads after being covered rather
  than continuously playing or prefetching unseen frames.
• Nested native model plots retain the correct selected-field identity.

Radar command line

The shipping bowecho executable now provides headless observed-radar
inspection, deterministic rendering, and receipt verification without starting
the desktop or GPU stack:

• bowecho radar inspect reports source format, site/time/VCP metadata,
  elevation cuts, moments, and gate geometry as human-readable or versioned
  JSON output.
• bowecho radar render produces deterministic transparent PNGs for selected
  moments and cuts, including explicit DVEL and CREF products when requested.
• bowecho radar verify recalculates source and artifact SHA-256 receipts and
  validates PNG dimensions and output containment.
• The production input router supports detectable NEXRAD Archive II, CfRadial,
  ODIM HDF5, DORADE, and JMA containers.

See the Radar command-line guide
for commands, schemas, and exit codes.

Satellite command line

• bowecho satellite list catalogs bounded UTC history from native GOES,
  Himawari, and Meteosat/MTG providers with exact object identifiers and JSON
  reporting. BowEcho makes no artificial earliest-date claim; provider holdings
  and advertised capabilities are authoritative.
• bowecho satellite fetch acquires an explicitly capped catalog snapshot into
  canonical satellite store runs. Empty or over-limit selections stop before
  writing.
• inspect, render, and verify expose stored frame/grid metadata, use
  BowEcho's production plotting paths, and create verifiable source and
  artifact receipts.
• GOES composites require their complete native channel set, Himawari frames
  require every expected segment, and MTG times/bounds/cadence come from live
  EUMETView capabilities. Native GOES and Himawari archive ingest currently
  uses a decode stride of four; MTG products are provider-rendered imagery.

See the Satellite command-line guide
for supported products, provider aliases, storage layout, and automation
contracts.

WRF command line and timing correctness

• bowecho wrf inspect, render, watch, and verify provide versioned JSON
  contracts, deterministic artifact paths, SHA-256 receipts, safe input/output
  handling, and stable exit codes for forecast automation.
• Rendering uses the desktop app's existing wrf_process to rw-store to native
  plot pipeline. The first severe preset covers reflectivity,
  precipitation, surface fields, native CAPE/CIN, updraft helicity, vertical
  velocity, and available snow/graupel products; repeatable --variable
  requests add supported two-dimensional fields.
• Live watch waits for its first readable file, uses stability or completion
  markers without trusting an unreadable file, resumes through an atomic
  journal, retries changed inputs, and skips unchanged files that already have
  verified receipts.
• Raw, full, and bulk WRF processing now inventories exact internal valid times
  and preserves sub-hourly timestamps through stored scenes and artifacts. A
  13:15 to 13:20 interval remains +00:05:00 instead of being relabeled as
  forecast hour 1.
• Interval precipitation survives floating-point time roundoff, and unavailable
  product reporting is scoped to the affected valid time rather than implying
  the product is absent from the entire run.
• Plot-only jobs avoid constructing unused sounding volumes, and watch jobs
  avoid re-reading unchanged processed files.

See the WRF command-line guide
for the run-manifest contract, preset inventory, watcher semantics, and
documented first-version limitations.

Operational notes

• Historical warning availability still depends on the public NWS archive and
  remains limited to supported US warning products.
• Model sounding requests still acquire the upstream model files required by
  the existing model pipeline; this release does not add field-level partial
  HRRR downloads. Successfully downloaded files remain cached for later
  soundings.
• Every official release asset is built from the v0.34.5 tag by GitHub
  Actions. Matching .sha256 files are published beside the Windows, macOS,
  and Linux downloads.