Kelton Halbert

Kelton Halbert

@stormscale.io

Personal account, views my own. Techniques Development Meteorologist for the Storm Prediction Center. See more of my photography: https://www.stormscale.io/photos My blog: https://www.stormscale.io

1.8K followers206 following1.7K posts

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Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

The cat is officially out of the bag. I promised a consequential first, here it is! On (or around) October 6th, for the first time in its 20+ year history, the SPC Mesoanalysis will be available to the field in real time via NCEP NOMADS. Oh, and it’s in NetCDF, not GRIB.

Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

Well, that was an awfully cool surprise to see in the NWS/NCO Senior Duty Meteorologist (SDM) log 🙃. Guess the PHP vulnerability storm has SSEC RealEarth and the CIMSS ProbSevere sites down. You can definitely use heimdall.stormscale.io though!

Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

Some more simulation fun from over the weekend! This time, a 3D Fiedler chamber vortex simulation. 40 x 40 x 15 km integrated for 4 hours. Horizontal dx = dy = 100m; dz 40m to 1km, stretching to 520m at the top above that. Free-slip laterals with no-slip top/bottom.

Kelton Halbert@stormscale.io

Having a little fun on my last day off with a little side project. The simulation ran on my GPU and is output every time step (0.5s), 25m grid spacing.

Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

2D horizontal slice is a little less interesting but still cool. Split-explicit RK3, 5th-order upwind momentum advection and WENO5-Z scalars. Took 28 minutes of integration on my GPU (5070 Ti) for 4 hours of simulation time. Not too bad!

Kelton Halbert reposted

Charlie Warzel
@cwarzel.bsky.social

70 percent of the internet was vulnerable yesterday to very bad security flaws inside a coding language. Turns out, *one volunteer* is mostly responsible for maintaining that code & helping push updates. Yesterday Ondřej Surý saved the internet. So I called him up www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

theatlantic.comThe Man Who Saved the Internet YesterdayOndřej Surý was a relatively anonymous volunteer working on PHP security. Then the internet exploded.

Kelton Halbert reposted

Tim Supinie
@plustssn.autumnsky.us

I released v1.1 of the REFS page this morning. Here's the change log, which includes all the stuff in the quoted thread.

Tim Supinie@plustssn.autumnsky.us

Here's an autumnplot-gl bug I hadn't found. A quirk of floating point numbers is that -0 is distinct from 0. Turns out, if you pass u=-0 to the autumnplot-gl barbs, MacOS incorrectly rotates the barb 180°. Or, it did until I fixed the dev branch just now. Still an "Easter egg" in the REFS page.

Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

Having a little fun on my last day off with a little side project. The simulation ran on my GPU and is output every time step (0.5s), 25m grid spacing.

Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

Flight to Reykjavik is delayed because of a lack of “spare parts” to replace some unknown mechanical issue. So. Here’s more Ireland!

Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

5:32 PM local time, flight was supposed to depart at 12:15 PM. Woke up at 5:00 AM to get to the airport from Galway only to spend all day waiting! Just hoping we actually get in to Reykjavik tonight. Feels like they could’ve flown in the part from Iceland by now. Anyway, here’s another pic.

Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

[Click to Enlarge] A panoramic stitch of the cliffs at Cleggan, earlier this afternoon. Just before this, a gusty shower came rolling through and drenched us on the hike through the sheep pastures. Worth it.

Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

Today was just ridiculous. Just some phone shots with like a badjllion on the camera to go through. Connemara is a wonderful place.

Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

West coast views and seaside fish & chips. I gotta find a way to get a remote job that’ll afford me the ability to move here.

Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

Guess who is getting married Saturday in Nashville with an outdoor reception 😂😭

Wisconet@wisconet.bsky.social

Tropical Depression 9 has developed over the Bay of Campeche, and is headed towards a northern Gulf Coast landfall by Friday or Saturday. Increasing moisture from the storm might make rain more likely late this weekend or early next week.

Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

That’s for all the support and feedback! Cleaning up a few things here and there based on your reports. Thankfully, mostly minor stuff 😅. Going to be taking a break for wedding/honeymoon, but then… what next? VWPs? Surface obs? RHIs/3D volumes? Let me know what you want to see next.

Kelton Halbert@stormscale.io

Sometimes you just have to draw a line in the sand and say something is ready. I've spent the last month or so not only adding level II site functionality to Heimdall, but what I consider to be genuinely novel functionality and interactivity. It's live for you to try at heimdall.stormscale.io

Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

The whole framing of this: creating something that facilitates CONUS-scale severe weather monitoring, but reduces the friction for drilling down to the storm scale. I don't claim to be perfect at UI/UX, but really trying to be focused and reduce friction. Your feedback would be most welcome.

Kelton Halbert@stormscale.io

Sometimes you just have to draw a line in the sand and say something is ready. I've spent the last month or so not only adding level II site functionality to Heimdall, but what I consider to be genuinely novel functionality and interactivity. It's live for you to try at heimdall.stormscale.io

Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

Sometimes you just have to draw a line in the sand and say something is ready. I've spent the last month or so not only adding level II site functionality to Heimdall, but what I consider to be genuinely novel functionality and interactivity. It's live for you to try at heimdall.stormscale.io

View full thread
Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

As always your feedback directly drives the work I do on this. Many of the features and functionality have been added owing to feedback emails, personal correspondence, and messages here. If something is broken, something has too much friction, or you have an idea for a feature: I want to hear it!

Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

For the curious: dealiasing is based on the algorithm used in PyART. I plan to revisit this in the future. If you want to disable, the layer manager -> radar layer settings -> dealiasing checkbox

Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

Sometimes you just have to draw a line in the sand and say something is ready. I've spent the last month or so not only adding level II site functionality to Heimdall, but what I consider to be genuinely novel functionality and interactivity. It's live for you to try at heimdall.stormscale.io

View full thread
Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

Finally: since it’s not immediately obvious, level II radar sites can be quickly accessed with a right-click or a long-press. You can add multiple sites, remove sites, go to nearest site, and replace sites through this menu system without having to open a drawer.

Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

The other non-obvious interaction: clicking on the radar in the legend brings up a quick menu that can change the radar moment and brings up the radar tilt selector. This helpful with multiple sites, and can be minimized by hitting the ‘-‘ to reclaim screen space. Up/down arrows change tilts too.

Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

Sometimes you just have to draw a line in the sand and say something is ready. I've spent the last month or so not only adding level II site functionality to Heimdall, but what I consider to be genuinely novel functionality and interactivity. It's live for you to try at heimdall.stormscale.io

View full thread
Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

Especially hard work went into performance. Handling multi-site level II radar 1) performantly and 2) intuitively was a difficult task. Adding the dynamic range gating was no small feat for desktop and mobile. Figuring out how it should behave with MRMS took some effort.

Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

I’m biased, but I also think this is hands down the best mobile experience for radar tilt selection of any app out there, full stop. Everyone else treats browsing multiple tilts as a second-class citizen. You don’t have to go through a sea of menus to interrogate a storm.

Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

Sometimes you just have to draw a line in the sand and say something is ready. I've spent the last month or so not only adding level II site functionality to Heimdall, but what I consider to be genuinely novel functionality and interactivity. It's live for you to try at heimdall.stormscale.io

View full thread
Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

Speaking of colormaps... Don't like my defaults, or just enjoy your personal colormaps? Just click/tap on the colorbar, or go to Settings (Cog Wheel) -> Palettes. You can import your GR color tables directly into Heimdall and assign them accordingly.

Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

This was a **lot** of work. About a month and 1200 commits. Everything works out of the box on mobile, too. Just because you can use LLM tools to generate code quickly doesn't mean you have to unleash the slop cannon on people. A lot of hard work went into testing, design, and correctness.

Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

Sometimes you just have to draw a line in the sand and say something is ready. I've spent the last month or so not only adding level II site functionality to Heimdall, but what I consider to be genuinely novel functionality and interactivity. It's live for you to try at heimdall.stormscale.io

Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

This includes an often requested change to the default QPE color tables, which I think is more in line with what people want and expect.

Kelton Halbert
@stormscale.io

As you can probably already gather, this also includes the often requested warnings functionality in both live and archive modes thanks to the wonderful Iowa State Mesonet (IEM)!

Kelton Halbert reposted

Tim Supinie
@plustssn.autumnsky.us

I've made a few tweaks and bug fixes in the last week, and SPC REFS Viewer v1.0 is live! www.spc.noaa.gov/exper/refs/v...

spc.noaa.govSPC REFS Ensemble Viewer
Tim Supinie@plustssn.autumnsky.us

Big REFS Transition Project 2 (SPC REFS viewer v1) is functionally complete. I sent a version around to SPC forecasters for a final pass at bugs this afternoon (though I realized I had a few more 5-minute tweaks I wanted to make when grabbing these screenshots).