This last week brought drying, except Tuesday which brought us 0.25". The rain, in my opinion was not a soaking rain but it was average. The temps didn't get too cold like normal winter storms. The latter half of the week was dominated by high pressure and scattered high clouds.
My spare time at night was spent evaluating some software new to me. The first is a free cross-platform program that essentially becomes a scientific GIS viewer for weather & climate data sets. Especially interesting to me was the ability to use live and archived NEXRAD data.
The Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) from Unidata is a Java(TM)-based software framework for analyzing and visualizing geoscience data. The IDV brings together the ability to display and work with satellite imagery, gridded data, surface observations, balloon soundings, NWS WSR-88D Level II and Level III radar data, and NOAA National Profiler Network data, all within a unified interface.
The program can also render movies and images combining data from many different sources. Although it is better for scientific evaluation, it does well at providing a good view of all the NEXRAD products.
The second program I found while obtaining data for the first. It's a simple application that provides basic visualization and data export of weather and climatological data archived at NCDC. It's called "NOAA's Weather and Climate Toolkit" and it seemed to be more appropriate for viewing archived weather data than the IDV.
Needless to say, the high clouds passing through on the 29th blocked my view of the moonrise, the "biggest" of the year but it did provide another spectacular sunset. I was able to see the moon later in the night, big and bright as ever.
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