Awesome

Tāwhirimātea

Introduction

Tawhiri is the name given to the next version of the CUSF Landing Prediction Software, which will probably be different enough from the current version (see below) to warrant a new name.

The name comes from a Māori god of weather, which rather aptly “drove Tangaroa and his progeny into the sea ” (WP).

This repository is a fork of the original CUSF repository with the following additions:

Docker container build scripts.
Addition of 'reverse profile' predictions, allowing estimation of balloon launch sites.
Addition of KML and CSV formatted responses.

SondeHub Tawhiri Instance

An instance of this predictor is used within the SondeHub Radiosonde and Amateur balloon tracking database and mapping system, with the main API URL available at: https://api.v2.sondehub.org/tawhiri (e.g. replace http://predict.cusf.co.uk/api/v1/ in the CUSF API documentation with https://api.v2.sondehub.org/tawhiri)

Please note this API is intended for use by the SondeHub and SondeHub-Amateur tracker websites, for other internal SondeHub use, and limited use by other amateur high-altitude-ballooning applications (e.g. ChaseMapper). If you intend to use this API heavily, or in a commercial setting, please contact us to discuss options. Heavy use of this API may result in it rate limiting or IP blocks.

More information

Please see the CUSF wiki, which contains pages on Tawhiri and prediction in general.

More detailed API and setup documentation.

Setup

Predictor

…is written for Python 3 (>3.6, due to the use of f-strings) and needs Cython:

$ virtualenv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ python setup.py build_ext --inplace

The last line (re-)builds the Cython extensions, and needs to be run again after modifying any .pyx files.

Run with:

$ tawhiri-webapp runserver

Downloader

The downloader was written before Python had good cooperative concurrency support, and so is instead a separate application in OCaml.

A containerised version of tawhiri-downloader, intended for use within the SondeHub system is available here: https://github.com/projecthorus/tawhiri-downloader-container/