VAPOR Users can make use of VAPOR’s geo-referencing capability to correctly position images of the earth into georeferenced scenes via the vaporgui Image tab. Several terrain images of the entire world are pre-installed with VAPOR, and can be accessed in the Image panel by clicking "Load installed image". These include global images of the earth’s visible surface (“BigBlueMarble.tms” and "NaturalEarth.tms") and several images of political boundaries, such as “USOutline.tif”.
As of version 2.5.0 vaporgui is capable reading and displaying multi-resolution, tiled image databases that follow the OSGeo TMS conventions. The VAPOR installation includes a limited number of TMS data sets. Higher resolution versions of some maps may be available for separate download here. Additionally, new TMS maps may be generated by the user as described here.
To improve rendering time or to make use of other images, you may need to retrieve other images from the Web, covering the specific region you are visualizing. VAPOR provides a shell script “getWMSImage.sh” that will obtain a satellite image of an arbitrary latitude/longitude region of the earth’s surface, and convert that image to a geo-referenced TIFF file that can be properly placed in a VAPOR scene. Other images, not necessarily from a satellite image, can be converted to geo-referenced TIFF files, for usage in a VAPOR scene, using the application “tiff2geotiff” that is included in the VAPOR distribution.
This section explains the usage of both of these two applications. An additional page discusses how to use georeferencing and terrain-mapping with non-WRF data.
