IEM Daily Feature
Tuesday, 04 February 2025

Goodbye RTP

Posted: 04 Feb 2025 05:30 AM

The National Weather Service issues a wide variety of data/products in "plain text" format that often has an insidious dual purpose of satiating computer and human readers at the same time. One such product was the Regional Temperature and Precipitation (RTP) [for example], which utilizes a brutal data format called SHEF, but is presented in an easy to read column format. Due to various reasons, most NWS offices are no longer producing this product, including all Iowa covering offices discontinuing the product on 31 January. So the featured chart presents a simple monthly accounting of issuance counts by NWS La Crosse for posterity and to advertise an IEM capability to generate RTPs on demand for those that have workflows based on this product or want the simple table data presentation.

Voting:
Good = 9
Bad = 2