DrJack RASP BLIPMAPs for New Zealand

1. North Island, north west of Hamilton
2. North Island, south east of Hamilton
3. South Island, north of the Rangitata river
4. South Island, south of the Rangitata river

Regional Atmospheric Soaring Prediction Boundary Layer Information Prediction maps is a specialized weather analysis tool intended for glider pilots. The tool that generates the maps was written by "Dr Jack", a meteorologist and glider pilot. This site however, is produced completely independently from DrJack.

Please note that this site is still a work in progress, so things can change from time to time, hopefully for the better.

Sponsored by the New Zealand Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association, the Matamata Soaring Centre, and the Omarama Soaring Centre.

New developments

April, 2013

• Changed to winter time.

March, 2013

• Added requested new SkewT-LogP (a.k.a. "tephigrams") to the South Island forecasts.

October, 2012

• The forecast server has been paid for for another year - thanks to the New Zealand Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association, the Matamata Soaring Centre, and the Omarama Soaring Centre, thank you so much!

May, 2012

• Removed the Hororata sounding from future forecasts, and changed the name of the Springfield sounding to reflect the Canterbury Gliding Club moving to their new field. Congratulations!

November, 2011

• Migrated to a new and more powerful server, sponsored by the New Zealand Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association, the Matamata Soaring Centre, the Auckland Gliding Club, and the Taranaki Gliding Club - thanks DH and KE! This new server is more powerful so in time I should be able to increase the accuracy of the forecasts.
• Changed the order the forecasts run in so that the North Island is completed first, since they are the ones paying for the service.
• Changed to daylight savings time, sorry for it being late.
• Increased the number of days a "high" confidence forecast is archived to 5,000. I may have to tweak this in the future so please do still let me know if you want a forecast archived permanently, or it may one day disappear.

July, 2011

• Changed how long archived forecasts are kept. "High" confidence forecasts are now kept for 400 days before they are deleted, while "above average" and "average" ones are only kept for 30 days.

April, 2011

• There was a problem with the first days in April, which I believe has now been fixed.

March, 2011

• Enabled the Cumulus Potential and OverDevelopment Potential forecasts by request.

January, 2011

• Added soundings for the airports at Christchurch (NZCH), Ashburton (NZAS), Hokitika (NZHK), Taupo (NZAP), and Whangarei (NZWR).
• Minor website tweaks.

November, 2010

• Migrated the website to the new web server. If you see this message then you are using the new server. Again, do let me know if anything is broken please!
• The webserver is currently having the occasional hiccup which can cause new forecasts to not be made available. The webserver is therefore going to be migrated to the new server in the next couple of days - this should fix the problem.
• Have been doing the occasional tweak to some pages.
• Was sent a link to a discussion on the Auckland HG and PG forum that compared RASP to reality.
• Another RASP admin made a Google Map showing all the known RASP installations in the world, it's pretty cool.

September, October 2010

• Added a simple page header graphic of an awesome image of lenticulars over Big Ben in Omarama, courtesy of my friend Oliver.
• Thanks to DH at the Matamata Soaring Centre, and KE from the New Zealand Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association, I now have RASP running on its very own dedicated server. This means all the regions are back to high-resolution forecasts, and there are more time-slots for the forecasts:
  • one finishes very early morning for the current day
  • one finishes around noon for the day after tomorrow
  • one finishes around 6pm for tomorrow
  As there have been some significant code changes to support this, it is possible some things may not work properly - please do let me know if that is the case!

July 2010

• The place markers on the maps now have a dot showing the location.

June 2010

• Fixed a PHP deprecation warning.

May 2010

• Changed the forecast times back to winter time (NZST). A bit late, I know...

March 2010

• Have re-enabled all regions, but now only the northern South Island is high resolution. Note that the low resolution regions will not show wave.
• Have disabled the atmospheric cross section plots, I don't think they were that useful.

February 2010

• Have temporarily re-enabled the central North Island region for the GNZ Nationals, and have made the two South Island regions lower resolution for the duration.

January 2010

• Have temporarily re-enabled the North Island forecasts while there is a gliding competition in Drury.
• Have unfortunately had to stop the North Island forecasts again, but I am working on a solution.
• Removed a lot of forecast types that were not that interesting or useful to save on space and bandwidth.
• Changed the timezone to be NZDT like it should, and added more forecast hours.

September 2009

• Switched the RASP data source to use the new NOAA NOMAD high-availability cluster. This means that RASP should be significantly more reliable from now on.
• We think the server problems are now fixed (turned out to be software) so RASP is running for the South Island again.
• RASP is unfortunately turned off at the moment while we investigate what seems to be a hardware error on the server. Because RASP needs so much server resources it is unfortunately the thing that makes the server fall over and die. Hopefully we will figure out what the problem is soon so that we can fix it, at which point I'll reenable RASP forecasts for the South Island.

July 2009

• RASP has been turned off for a while, it was just taking too much processing time on the server. I've now re-enabled it for the South Island only (since that is where I am). Sorry about that North Islanders, in 9 months or so the server will probably be replaced with a beefier one if nobody volunteers a server I can use.

April 2009

• Added the region map on the front page.
• Tweaked a bunch of the other plots to give them fixed colours. Much better now.
• Tweaked the rain forecast scale, and ended up making the scale fixed for thermal updraft (and derivatives), CAPE, and upper level vertical velocity. It is now much easier to view these using the Image Browser mode.
• Added rain forecasts.
• Added some missing forecasts to the central north island region.

March 2009

• Added this New Developments log you're reading and tried to remember all the work I've done on RASP this year.
• Added some help text for soundings, including a PDF document written by Dr Ian M. Brooks at the University of Leeds.
• Added an "Image browser" to make it easier to view all the times of a particular plot in a convenient way by just moving the mouse pointer over the time you want to see.
• Changed forecasts to be hourly. A full days forecast for all the four regions now take between 280-350 megs; about 10 gigs per month.
• The plot type, date and time is now displayed in the browser title bar and at the top of each plot page.
• Did some behind-the-scene refactoring of code. The website is now approaching 1,000 lines written in 28 files.
• Upgraded to the latest RASP code, after DrJack fixed a serious bug.

February 2009

• Added sounding and cross-section for Queenstown. Other sites can be added on request.

January 2009

• Archived forecasts are now permanently deleted after 3 months. It is possible to mark days to not be deleted on request.

Disclaimer: Use at your own risk. Do not use for protection of life or property. No liability is accepted for the use of this website in any way.

Comments? Email me: mats at zakalwe dot com