Predictions update

A feature we've been meaning to get to is showing predictions for longer. What do I mean by this?

Previously predictions only used the last 5 minutes worth of data to generate a prediction, however this was based on current time. So if the radiosonde had not been received in 5 minutes then the prediction wouldn't run. Some of our users enjoy trying to find radiosondes well after they've landed and after the radio transmitter had stopped so its necessary to have a good idea of where the radiosonde was likely to land.

As of this afternoon predictions are now saved in our ElasticSearch cluster and if all goes well you should be able to saved predictions with each radiosonde flight.

For example this radiosonde landed roughly 30 minutes ago and we can still its prediction up on the map.

Because we save all the data now this allows us to visualise the predictor. This could be useful to detecting issues with our prediction models or software. Here's the same radiosonde above but visualising the predictions over time.

I'm sure a lot of you are going to have fun this new data and enjoy trying to recover old radiosondes. Just remember that it only applies to radiosondes launched to today onwards. You should also see more frequent predictions compared to the old method.

Implementation details

The implementation of this is actually fairly simple. Basically the old predictor logic has been moved to a Lambda function that's run every minute. This queries ElasticSearch like it did before to find radiosondes in the last 5 minutes and calculate their ascent/descent data. It then queries our Tāwhirimātea (CUSF flight predictor) instance and then save the results back to ElasticSearch

The API endpoint was simply updated to query ElasticSearch for the results rather than Tāwhirimātea.

That's all I have for today. I've been finding it hard to get time to focus on this sort of work so it's pretty rad to finally get this fixed up. It's been bugging me for several months now!

Stay safe, and all the best

~ Michaela