It was a bright but rainy day at the height of the fall colors, so we took a Sunday drive out to the boonies. I took the camera, but didn’t use it, though the trees were very colorful. Fortunately, I did take the GPS! This video shows the location of our car on a map in relation to the weather as we drove along. If that sounds boring, don’t worry, it has an epic soundtrack thanks to Free Music by DanoSongs.com. Note that the time scale in this video is not constant, as explained in the production notes after the break.
We’d never been to Hermann before, so we stopped at the winery. It’s a very picturesque town, but it was infested with Oktoberfest tourists, and we didn’t stay long. Much later we stopped in Cuba for a fast-food dinner after deciding to try to beat the storms out of Rolla. It was dark by then. There was some spectacular cloud-to-cloud lightning to the north of the highway on the way back to town, before the rains caught us again.
Looks good full screen. I wonder if YouTube does a two-pass reencoding? This looks a lot better now than when I first uploaded it.
I have a need for a utility to translate shapefiles to SVG images, and I’m thinking of writing my own. I’m aware of the one at carto.net. I don’t like that it requires shp2pgsql, though; there are native Perl modules for parsing shapefiles so there should be no need for external executables with their own prerequisites. Also, if I write my own I can put into it whatever features that I want… if they are within my capabilities.
If anyone stumbles across this post and has something that they’d like to see in such a utility, please leave a comment.
Update: Success!
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Radar on Blue Marble image
This is a test run of the nation-wide (lower 48) weather radar animated on a Blue Marble image, with state outlines. The YouTube link is here, and it’s embedded below, along with a short discussion of the necessary steps to make it, and what could make it better.
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This is a simple JavaScript calculator for figuring out world files.
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Long story – short
To project the individual frames for this video I used:
gdalwarp -tr 10000 10000 -s_srs EPSG:4326 -t_srs EPSG:2163 nation.gif nationproj.tif
Long story – long
I finally figured out some of the mojo necessary to get some good out of gdalwarp. For me the key was to understand the “spatial reference system” (SRS) parameters. Key to understanding that was grokking the “+proj” notation used in the proj program.
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