Dear OSCAR/Surface users,
Have you ever been faced with any problem or got confused using OSCAR/Surface? Leave a comment and let us know!
In fact, for OSCAR/Surface we have several kinds of resources providing guidance and help, e.g. user manual, webinars, tutorial videos, etc., and we would love to make the most of them. So, your feedback to OSCAR/Surface and suggestions on how to improve the system are very much welcome.
Let us know your opinion and Happy new year!
Ran
Dear Ran,
Same to you and thanks for your message.
I am confusing about program/network affiliation of stations.
I would like to know the relationship of program/network affiliation and variables observed from different stations. We have Meteorological stations, Hyrological stations, Meteorological and Hydrological stations, Agrometeorological stations, aviation meteorological stations and weather radar stations. In my opinion synoptic stations are affiliated to RBSN, is it right? Could you kindly explain me?
Best regards,
Ohmar
Hi Ohmar,
Thank you for your reply.
Regarding the programme/network affiliation, the person who has rights to edit the station can affiliate the station with certain programme(s)/network(s). In your case, you could affiliate synoptic stations to RBSN if you think it is reasonable. In some cases, joining the programme/network may be subject to approval. In this case, the programme focal point will receive an automatic e-mail asking for approval of the request. While the approval process is not completed, the affiliation will be shown as “pending”.
FYI, you could also check the OSCAR/Surface User Manual to get detailed information on how to affiliate a station to certain programme/network. The link is here.
I hope this helps and please do not hesitate to contact if you have any more questions.
Have a nice weekend!
Ran
Dear colleagues,
Ran is looking into how we can improve the documentation of OSCAR, so if you have anything to share with her in this respect, please get in touch with her.
We are looking for things that may be covered by the existing documentation, but hard to find or not well explained, or things that you would like to be added.
As you know, we have the Manual, Webinars, Videdos and OSCAR FAQs, and we are looking into how this could be better intergrated.
best regards,
Timo
Dear Janet,
WIGOS Data Quality Monitoring System retrieves metadata information from OSCAR/Surface on a daily basis. For example, the availability maps are generated in near-real time by comparing the observations received by the NWP Centers against
the schedules retrieved from OSCAR/Surface. Therefore, if the metadata
has been updated today, tomorrow's maps should
reflect that change. In the case you mentioned, if a new station is added in OSCAR/Surface, it should appear on the WDQMS availability map the next day. If that does not happen, it means that some fields may have not been correctly populated in OSCAR/Surface and you will need to report the issue.
Regards,
CristinaHello,
I have a process to download the legacy Vol A file once per month for use locally, and I'm planning to replace this to use OSCAR APIs directly. Thanks to all your useful training resources and sample code I have a python program that gets a list of stations then downloads individual station XML to extract the pressure sensor height. However, I wonder if I'm using the best approach as this is very slow (18 minutes for 431 UK stations, and I'm hoping to get 13000+ global stations in the same way).
All the other fields I need for local processing are returned by the SEARCH API so it's accessing the individual metadata records just for the pressure sensor height that takes the time.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can make this process more efficient, for example how to do a bulk download of multiple metadata records?
Many thanks,
Sheila
Hi Sheila,
you are right that batch downloading is currently slow for large number of stations and this is something we are currently discussing in the project.
While we are working on performance improvements and a better way to batch download information from OSCAR, please do not parallelize your downloads and keep the rate at ~3 seconds per download, as otherwise this leads to too much load in OSCAR and may lead to your IP being temporarily blocked.
We will keep the community informed about improvements in this realm!
best regards,
Timo