Balloon Trajectory Simulator

This code implements a simulation of the flight of a balloon starting from a given point on the globe at a certain time. For the simulation, the weather forecast (wind directions) for the corresponding time is downloaded from GFS.

File System

• hap_physics_engine.py: the main code to run, it simulates the balloon flight (contain all balloon's params)
• astra_GFS.py: for interacting with the NOAA's Global Forecast System, original code - ASTRA Simulator
• global_tools.py: tools for interacting with GFS, original code - ASTRA Simulator
• interpolate.py: interpolate the data from GFS, original code - ASTRA Simulator; it does interpolation of data with 4 parametres: lon, lat, press, time
• kml_generator.py: generate .kml file from list of coordinates (lat, lon, alt)

astra_GFS.py more detailed

Use GFS_Handler for downloading forecast from NOAA's GFS. GFS_Handler gets latitude, longitude and time from which it is starting to downoload the data.

The difference compare to the original ASTRA function are following:

• it useds U and V instead of wind velocity and direction (U is the velocity towards East and V is the velocity towards North)
• the temperature is calculated with Kelvin (not Celsius)

Run the code

• activate HAP environment in the server (hap)
• run python hap_physics_engine.py command to start simulation

The output of the simulation is coordinates which can be converted to .kml file (using kml_generator.py) and put in Google Earth to see the trajectory on the map.

Results