A group of undergraduate and graduate students from the University of Oklahoma School of Meteorology (SoM) have developed and implemented a scheme for plotting and analyzing weather data, using the schools available computing resources. This project has been colloquially known as the “Hoot Project” and was started in Fall 2004 in response to the students' desire for the production of reliable weather data focused on the Southern Great Plains. The final objective for the project is to have a set of fully automated scripts to plot and analyze surface, upper-air, radar, satellite, and model data.

The data used in the Hoot Project are available to everyone in the SoM through the various weather data feeds. The data are processed into GEneral Meteorological PAcKage (GEMPAK) format for use in its plotting programs. In order to produce timely weather products consistently, the use of computer scripting is required. A combination of C-shell and Perl scripting languages has enabled the process to be automated. Multiple scripts are utilized for the production of one weather product and a sample script structure will be examined.

Throughout the Hoot Project and the creation of our automated weather products, many problems arose. There were difficulties with data flow, limited computing resources and GEMPAK “issues”. Most of the problems have been solved using inventive scripting and staggering script running times. Then end product is a new weather data and forecasting page located at http://hoot.metr.ou.edu.