Consulting

Dr Robert Dahni is a meteorologist who has worked in the Australian Bureau of Meteorology for over 30 years. From weather forecasting, IT support in research and operations to software development for domestic and international projects, he has developed skills in the analysis and visualisation of meteorological data.

Are you interested in a customisable Time Series Visualiser to meet your specific data analysis and visualisation requirements? An Interactive Multidimensional Analysis and Visualisation of Time Series Data application can read one-minute meteorological (or, alternatively, high frequency financial) data. Other examples of work utilising IDL are presented below.

Contact Dr Robert Dahni for custom IDL training and programming services, "transforming data into visualisations and problems into solutions".

VOGON

VOGON is an interactive desktop application for the analysis and visualisation of the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Global operational Forecast System (GFS) high resolution (0.5 degree) data available at http://nomads.ncep.noaa.gov/, and the Bureau of Meteorology's (Australian Community Climate and Earth-System Simulator) ACCESS NWP Data (downloaded via OpenDAP). VOGON (latest version 1.0 April 2012) is written entirely in IDL. VOGON is an extension of GFS Visualiser (e.g. addition of ACCESS data). More...

GFS Visualiser

GFS Visualiser is an interactive desktop application for the analysis and visualisation of the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Global operational Forecast System (GFS) high resolution (0.5x0.5 degree) data available at http://nomads.ncep.noaa.gov/ (downloaded via OpenDAP). GFS Visualiser (version 1.2 December 2010) is written entirely in IDL. GFS Visualiser is a significant upgrade to Grid Visualiser (e.g. use of Tab Widgets in the GUI and generation of meteograms).
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Spatial Weather Tools

Spatial Weather Tools is a collection of extensible components for the meteorological processing and spatial conversion of historical or real-time weather data. The tools can analyse and transform the weather data into spatial formats. A spatially-enabled weather service will allow better integration of real-time weather data into clients' Geographic Information System to improve the clients' decision making capabilities. For example, raw polar radar data from the Bureau of Meteorology can be processed to generate geo-referenced radar data, images, shapefiles or GML. Spatial Weather Tools is a product application of the Interactive Data Language (IDL). More...

Land Cover

Land Cover is the process to extract and geo-reference, and crop, mask and scale MODIS (i.e. MOD13Q1) grids (downloaded from Reverb) of 250m 16 days Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), pixel reliability summary QA (Cloudy Points) and composite day of the year (CDOY), to interpolate and smooth the EVI time series data using the CDOY, and create EVI image stacks containing no "Bad" points.

Particle Tracking

Particle tracking is an investigation of the identification and tracking of targets in satellite or radar imagery, utilising the methodology of John Crocker and Eric Week's Particle Tracking using IDL. Each image has been sectorised, contrast enhanced and filtered to locate the features (i.e. clouds or thunderstorms) to be tracked. Features are tracked from image to image with wind barbs or vectors plotted over the latest image to represent the recent motion of the clouds or the expected track of the thunderstorms. More...

Image Enhancement

Enhancements improve the viewing quality of satellite imagery because the human eye cannot discern as many gray shades as can be displayed in most types of satellite imagery. Enhancements can exaggerate minor shading differences or highlight features of interest. Image enhancements available include lightening, darkening, false colouring and contrast stretching. More...