Overview 

• Project Length - 1 year (2020-2021)
• CEMAC Output - Help develop annotation plug in for forest
  
• Project Site - Forest , forest-barc
• Funding Body - WCSSP
  

Description:

The Bokeh Annotation and Reporting Component (BARC) is new software that has been developed for the WCSSP SEA project as part of an NCAS-CEMAC collaboration. The BARC software is designed as a plug-in to  FOREST (Forest Observations and Research Evaluation and Survey Toolkit), a visualization software being developed by the UK Met Office (UKMO) that allows for easy access to visualize state of the art weather forecasts.

The purpose of BARC is to enable forecasters and scientists to add annotations and mark features onto visualized weather forecast data in FOREST. These annotations and mark-ups allow for the highlighting of important features in the data and can help to signify areas that may be expected to experience extreme weather events such as heavy rainfall or strong winds. Alongside the annotations, the software allows the user to write notes and add comments about the data they are visualizing and the annotations they have drawn. These features can allow for more streamlined forecasting or an easy to use teaching tool.

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BARC Tool Highlights:

 

BARC can be used to draw fronts, weather symbols, custom text and freehand lines on top of forecast data or other data such as rapidly developing thunderstorm data as shown in the image above. The user can create a report by adding comments, metadata and categorizing the report and saving and exporting the auto generated report shown above. To explore the full functionality available please refer to the the barc-docs

FOREST-BARC can be run on your laptop if you have access to data or it can be hosted on a remote server for multiple users. To run a simple test case the source code can be easily installed and run following the instructions in the github repository.