[Mapserver-users] Weather / Climate information using MapServer

[Frank Warmerdam]

Geoffrey Rowland wrote:
> Anyone doing this?  Specifically I'm trying to get  min/max temps and 
> precip layers on top of a shp file I am using. I have some data from 
> NOAA, however I'm not familair with it's format.  I can open it up in 
> GrADS and view the data on a map, so I would think *in theory* I should 
> be able to get this data into a format that mapserver can work with, I'm 
> just not sure how to go about doing that. I also have access to safe 
> softwares feature manipulation engine if that would be of any help (for 
> translations).  Can anyone point me in the right direction?
> 
> I am getting the data from the following locations
> 
> precip
> ftp://ftpprd.ncep.noaa.gov/pub/precip/wd52ws/us_daily/

Geoffrey,

The data files are "raw" floating point according to the README.  It would
be pretty easy to write a GDAL compatible .aux file describing them.   I can
help with that offline if you can't find enough info in the GDAL "PAux" format
page.

But because the data is not 8bit raster there are issues with how it will
get displayed in MapServer.  You can let MapServer rescale the data to 8bit
on the fly, but depending on how exact you want to be you might be better off
reclassifying it outside mapserver first.  Note that MapServer does not
currently support raster classes for raster values outside the range 0-255
even though that might be ideal for situations like this.

Best regards,

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