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Soundings & Hodographs

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full-bars edited this page Jul 5, 2026 · 2 revisions

Soundings & Hodographs 📈

SPCBot provides automated and on-demand tools for atmospheric analysis, focusing on observed data from the RAOB and VWP networks.

🎈 Observed Soundings (/sounding)

The /sounding command plots RAOB (weather balloon) and ACARS (aircraft) data using SounderPy.

  • Location Support: Accepts 3-letter site IDs (e.g., OUN), 4-letter ICAO codes (KOUN), or city names (Norman, OK).
  • Data Sources: Automatically tries IEM, Wyoming, and GSL (FSL) in a prioritized hierarchy with circuit-breaker logic.
  • Interactive UI: Users can select specific times (e.g., 00z, 12z) or recent special releases (e.g., 18z, 20z) via a dropdown menu.
  • Fast Placeholder + Upgrade: A minimal Skew-T (temperature, dewpoint, wind barbs) posts within ~1s via MetPy on the default thread executor. The message is then upgraded in place with the full SounderPy plot (~55s) once it's ready from the sounding worker pool, falling back gracefully if the fast plot fails.

🌪️ Watch-Triggered Soundings

The bot proactively monitors severe weather and automatically posts soundings:

  • Issuance Trigger: When an SPC Tornado or Severe Tstorm watch is issued, the bot immediately fetches and posts the nearest observed sounding.
  • Synoptic Cycles: During active watches, the bot automatically posts the 00z and 12z soundings for all stations near the watch area.
  • Risk Sweep: On Moderate or High Risk days, the bot sweeps every RAOB and ACARS airport within 100km of the high-risk polygon as new data arrives.

🌀 VWP Hodographs (/hodograph)

The /hodograph command generates a Vertical Wind Profile (VWP) hodograph for any of 200+ NEXRAD or TDWR radar sites.

  • Real-time Surface Wind: Automatically fetches the latest ASOS surface observation near the radar to provide an accurate surface-to-1km profile.
  • Parameter Table: Includes a comprehensive storm-parameter table (Bunkers motion, SRH, Shear) rendered alongside the plot.
  • Location Names: Displays the city/state alongside the site code (e.g. KOAX (Omaha, NE)), backed by a RADAR_NAMES mapping covering all 209 NEXRAD and TDWR sites.
  • Library: Uses the vad-plotter library (by Tim Supinie) for high-accuracy VWP binary parsing.

🔬 Scientific Stack

These tools rely on a Debian-based scientific Python stack included in the SPCBot Docker image:

  • MetPy: Atmospheric calculations and skew-T rendering.
  • SounderPy: Vertical profile data retrieval.
  • Matplotlib & Cartopy: High-quality scientific visualization.

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