User:Jdorje/Tracks
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[edit] Purpose
Storm tracks for older hurricanes and seasons are rather inferior. Unisys provides tracking maps [1] based on the NHC "best track" data, but these are non-free. The goal of this little project is to make tracking maps that are Free.
[edit] The project
The track map generator can now be found here.
[edit] Technical Details
The track map generator program generates a track map from the NHC hurdat data. This is almost exactly what the UNISYS tracks provide.
It works on a geographic projection map. Any such map covering the entire world will do. Currently I use a NASA satellite-built map from Image:Whole_world_-_land_and_oceans.jpg. It might be better to use a political or semi-political map; it would definitely be good to see the geographic lines. The map should be high-res, preferably at least 4000x2000 (remember the source map must cover the whole world so for atlantic hurricanes most of it isn't drawn).
[edit] Installation
You will need cairo (graphics), SVN, gcc or another C compiler, and optionally perl. It has only been tested on a Debian GNU/Linux system.
Download the program by running the following command:
svn co svn://svn.gna.org/svn/tropicalcyclone/trunk/tracks svn co svn://svn.gna.org/svn/tropicalcyclone/trunk/tracks-data
Next, go to the tracks directory and compile it by running
./autogen.sh && make
if this fails, it could be because you're missing one of the requirements (above).
[edit] Running
The straightforward way to generate a track is via the "track" program, which will create the track in the file "output.png":
./track --year 2004 --name ivan ./track --year 1928 --id 4 ./track --year 1961 --id 18 --input wpac.txt
For upload to wikipedia, it is better to add the entry to the storms.pl file. Once the entry is added, rerun
./storms.pl
to create the image (in the storms/ directory) and tell you what text to put into the page when you upload it to wikipedia commons. Someday this will be used to automatically re-upload images when the best-track or color scheme is changed. Once added to storms.pl, the new storms file should be put back to svn (via "svn ci"), or just send a diff ("svn diff") to me. One interesting thing to do is to uncomment every storm entry from storms.pl and rerun: you will end up with many gigabytes of images which comprise the entire tracks available on wikipedia commons.
[edit] Output
A vast amount of output is now available at Commons:Category:Tropical cyclone tracks.
