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Environmental Data Abstraction Layer libraries
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Using Lagrangian Transport over Streamlines to represent current/wind #104

Open marceloandrioni opened 6 years ago

marceloandrioni commented 6 years ago

Some websites like https://www.windy.com https://earth.nullschool.net http://viewer.coaps.fsu.edu/GlobalHycom/mapviewer# use lagrangian transport of simulated particles over streamlines to represent current and wind. In my opinion this greatly improves the representation of eddies, meanders, etc when compared to simple vectors. I was wondering if is possible to add this functionality to edal-java/ncwms. I am not sure if is possible to create an "animated" WMS layer, if it isn't maybe this could be implemented like the animation, that is, a "Open the streamline wizard" button. In this option the user could define the particles number, color, "speed", life time, etc. I believe the best reference would be https://github.com/olmozavala/OWGIS_V2 written by @olmozavala that is used for http://viewer.coaps.fsu.edu/GlobalHycom/mapviewer#. It's also written in Java and in fact uses ncWMS to retrieve the layers. Other great option would be to allow to superimpose the streamline layer over other layers in the same dataset (e.g. streamlines over ssh). But with this options if the dataset had more than one layer capable of "producing" streamlines (a current and a wind layer), the "Open the streamline wizard" would have to have a option to select which layer to calculate the streamlines from. Thank you.

guygriffiths commented 6 years ago

I've considered this before, but I think it extends the scope of ncWMS quite a lot. Providing animated WMS layers, whilst not against the spec, would certainly be unexpected behaviour (and would require that the layer was requested in GIF format). I'm happy to leave it open in case someone fancies implementing it, but it's quite low priority and I doubt I'll find time to do it in the near future.

marceloandrioni commented 6 years ago

Ok, thank you for letting me know. Unfortunately, as my knowledge of Java is basically null, I won't be stepping up to the task, but maybe someone will contrib in the future as you said. Thanks.