NOAA radar page no longer uses RIDGE urls

[jessehamner]

In mid-December 2020, NOAA stopped posting the composite reflectivity images and image layers to the "ridge" URLs. Thus, the functionality has broken for making radar and time-series radar images. The new images are available for download as TIFFs and/or KML files. The TIFFs include no other layers but the false-color radar information.

[jessehamner]

TIFFs are georeferenced. This opens a reasonable path for overlaying either vector or raster data as part of the work flow and creating a decent cognate (and potentially higher resolution) to the previous RIDGE images.

[jessehamner]

Not sure how I feel about the purple image for the bottom of the reflectivity false-color scale, but I didn't have to do anything to align it to WGS84 / Long-Lat, so the workflow will be simpler than it might otherwise have been.

[jessehamner]

Using a messy mix of GDAL, Fiona, descartes, matplotlib, and cartopy for some experimentation. "Premature optimization" and all that. The obstacles to UX being workable for this setup is that the GeoTIFF extents seem far too large (though accurately aligned). Probably useful to make a clip coverage based on radar's effective radius and set bounding box dimensions based on that instead of those contained in the GeoTIFF.