A weather forecasting system for the Very Large Array (VLA) site in the Plains of San Augustin, NM. Forecasts, plots, and reports are created for:
- Basic weather properties such as near-surface wind speed, gusts, and precipitation.
- Cloud coverage and cloud optical depth.
- Observing efficiency time given opacity, sky brightness temperature, and cloud coverage.
- Astronomical phase stability predicted from a machine learning model trained on NWP forecast data and measured values of the phase RMS up to the forecast prediction window.
The primary numerical weather prediction sources are the NOAA's Global Forecasting System (GFS) and High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR). These are queried using the free open-meteo API for single-location time series data and, when needed, Herbie for cut-out maps of the full-frame CONUS data. The images are primarily for estimating cloud properties and coverage.
Documentation on how to install and use this package may be found at
https://vla_forecast.readthedocs.io . Atmospheric radiative transfer is
performed using Scott Paine's code AM via the Python wrapper amwrap.
Currently only Unix-like operating systems (i.e., Linux and macOS) are
supported. Building the depdencies AM and amwrap requires GNU Make and a
C compiler, such as GCC. The parallel version of AM requires a C compiler with
OpenMP support.
To install site_forecast, run the following from the command line:
pip install git+https://github.com/autocorr/site_forecast.gitor alternatively:
git clone https://github.com/autocorr/site_forecast.git
cd site_forecast
pip install .Forecasts can be generated using the Forecast class.
from site_forecast import Forecast
fc = Forecast()
print(fc)
fc.create_plots()
fc.save()This software is authored by Brian Svoboda copyright 2025 and released under the
GNU General Public License Agreement Version 3 (GPLv3). The full text of the
license is supplied in the LICENSE file included with the software.
AM is authored by Scott Paine of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. The AM software is a work of the United States and may be used freely, with attribution and credit to the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. The program is intended for educational, scholarly or research purposes.