Notebook for generating hourly MRMS composite derecho plots

[EWolffWX]

Hi all! At the suggestion of Max Grover, I wanted to share this notebook here. A few months ago I was asked to recreate this image put out by the NWS in 2020: (https://www.weather.gov/images/dmx/SigEvents/20200810_Derecho/NWSChicago_HourlyRadarTimesteps.jpg)
I had used GridRad to accomplish this, but recently revisited the code and adjusted it to download and use MRMS data from AWS instead. I wrote some of this very quickly, so I’m sure there are plenty of ways to make it more efficient, but it does make a pretty cool plot. This is the derecho that passed through Illinois on June 29th:

Here’s a link to the notebook on Github (GitHub - EWolffWX/MRMS_Derecho_Composites: Jupyter notebook to create composite images of derechos using MRMS data from each hour). I’m happy to answer any questions about what I did and I’m eager to hear any suggestions for improvements. Thanks!

[kmuehlbauer]

Welcome at openradar discourse, @EWolffWX! Very nice imagery!

When comparing the two it looks like the June 29th moved a bit slower and was not as widespread. How often do these kind of events happen?

[EWolffWX]

Thanks for the warm welcome! I’m excited to read through posts and get some new ideas for working with radar data. Yeah, one of the cool things with these plots is being able to get an idea of propagation speed. This one was definitely a little slower and also dove south over time. Derechos are relatively rare as far as weather events go, but this part of the country sees an average of one each year (usually in the summer months, so this was pretty on par with the climatology). The NWS has a really great explainer page that I used to refresh my knowledge on them (Derecho).

[mgrover1]

Thank you for sharing this here @EWolffWX and welcome to the forum!!

[EWolffWX]

Thanks for the invite Max! Excited to learn from folks here!

[jorahu]

Really cool visualisation! Definitely saving that one. Thanks for sharing!