Recon observations — Hurricane Katrina (2005)¶

Fetch aircraft reconnaissance high-density flight-level observations (product='recon', recon_product='hdobs') for Hurricane Katrina and plot them coloured by surface wind speed.

recon is storm-keyed: variables is a list of storm ids, and basin/source resolve them. The result is a vector FeatureCollection of observation points.

Cost. This downloads Katrina's flight-level files (tens of seconds) and returns tens of thousands of obs. Needs pip install earthlens[tropycal].

In [ ]:

from pathlib import Path

from earthlens import EarthLens

OUT_DIR = Path('tropycal_output')
OUT_DIR.mkdir(exist_ok=True)

obs = None
try:
    obs = EarthLens(
        data_source='tropycal',
        product='recon',
        recon_product='hdobs',
        variables=['AL122005'],
        basin='north_atlantic',
        source='hurdat',
        start='2005-08-23',
        end='2005-08-31',
        aoi=[-98.0, 18.0, -80.0, 31.0],
        path=str(OUT_DIR),
    ).download(progress_bar=False)
    print(len(obs), 'recon observations')
except Exception as exc:
    print(f'skipped live query: {type(exc).__name__}: {exc}')

from pathlib import Path from earthlens import EarthLens OUT_DIR = Path('tropycal_output') OUT_DIR.mkdir(exist_ok=True) obs = None try: obs = EarthLens( data_source='tropycal', product='recon', recon_product='hdobs', variables=['AL122005'], basin='north_atlantic', source='hurdat', start='2005-08-23', end='2005-08-31', aoi=[-98.0, 18.0, -80.0, 31.0], path=str(OUT_DIR), ).download(progress_bar=False) print(len(obs), 'recon observations') except Exception as exc: print(f'skipped live query: {type(exc).__name__}: {exc}')

Inspect the observations¶

In [ ]:

if obs is not None and len(obs):
    display(
        obs[
            ['storm_id', 'recon_product', 'time', 'wspd_kt', 'pres_hpa', 'geometry']
        ].head()
    )
    print('CRS:', obs.crs)

if obs is not None and len(obs): display( obs[ ['storm_id', 'recon_product', 'time', 'wspd_kt', 'pres_hpa', 'geometry'] ].head() ) print('CRS:', obs.crs)

Plot the obs points coloured by wind speed¶

In [ ]:

if obs is not None and len(obs):
    import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

    fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(8, 6))
    obs.plot(ax=ax, column='wspd_kt', cmap='viridis', legend=True, markersize=4)
    ax.set_title('Katrina (2005) recon flight-level obs, coloured by wind (kt)')
    ax.set_xlabel('Longitude')
    ax.set_ylabel('Latitude')
    plt.tight_layout()
    plt.show()

if obs is not None and len(obs): import matplotlib.pyplot as plt fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(8, 6)) obs.plot(ax=ax, column='wspd_kt', cmap='viridis', legend=True, markersize=4) ax.set_title('Katrina (2005) recon flight-level obs, coloured by wind (kt)') ax.set_xlabel('Longitude') ax.set_ylabel('Latitude') plt.tight_layout() plt.show()