More mapping fun

[Raellus]

These are very cool maps, Castlebravo. Any plans to do up a European fallout contours and targets map?

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[castlebravo92]

Originally Posted by Raellus

These are very cool maps, Castlebravo. Any plans to do up a European fallout contours and targets map?

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If someone gives me a laydown file with lat, lon, yield, height of burst, and (ideally) date of detonation, I can produce them for wherever. Europe will take a little bit more work to get a "realistic" fallout map because the attacks happens over a period of around ~16 months in total, whereas with the Thanksgiving Day Massacre, I can pretty much handwave and say they all occurred on 11-28-97 and use a single day's weather file (that's really why I need the date of each attack, so I can see what NOAA weather files I need to download and use).

Incidentally, what I did to produce the fallout maps is this:
1. Created a Nuclear War Simulator replay scenario with the target list (editing the json directly - doing it through the GUI for ~170 detonations is tedious and error prone).
2. Ran the replay through the detonations.
3. Ran the HYSPLIT/NWS integration to generate the fallout textures
4. Wrote a python script to convert the directory of fallout textures to a KML file.
5. Load the KML file into QGIS.

There was about a week of iterating to get #4 working properly and with decent visuals (the PSI rings were created with a different python script I had written a couple of months prior).

In NWS, you can specify the number of particles used in the fallout simulation. I think the ones above were generated using 1000 particles. I just did a run (it took two days) using 60,000 particles, and...it looks basically identical to the one using 1000 particles (which can run in about 10 minutes).

In any event, the process is streamlined to where it's pretty low effort once I have the laydown file.