Dennis,

RUCs around the world? Gee, we don't know of anything except for the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland, and Roskilde University in Copenhagen, but that's probably not what you had in mind. (Those are the two things you can learn about, besides the Rapid Update Cycle, in doing a web search on 'RUC'.) You might try to send some email to the UK Meteorological Office and see if they have any interactive web sites for soundings. I suspect that Europe will be the next location for some kind of high-frequency update computer weather forecast model like the RUC, but none exists yet to our knowledge. Good luck!

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original message -

I've found the 40kmLatLon boundary file for the 'North American' RUC, but I'm running into a dead end finding similar data for the RUCs run elsewhere in the world. Can anyone help?

A soaring pilot in England is developing a soaring lift prediction program, and I'm helping him find data sources, etc. The program currently allows the pilot to specify a rawinsonde site by placing a cursor on a graphic globe of the world to get the closest sounding data. Once the pilot does that, they input the predicted sfc hi, and the program then produces the necessary lift forecast. So, all that works fine.

We're trying, however, to use RUC data for forecasted soundings using the same 'point on the globe' approach (we probably will enhance it later to allow the pilot to manually enter Lat/Lon). Our challenge now is to get boundaries for all the various RUC run around the world ... idea is that if the pilot doesn't live within the boundary of any RUC model, the program will not offer that as a data selection, and instead use global model data to get the necessary info.

Thanks...
deckert7@gte.net