prop/lib/microwaveprop_web/live/about_live.ex
Graham McIntire aab3c3736c
feat: extend HRRR forecast horizon from 18h to 48h
HRRR publishes f21-f48 at 3-hourly intervals in addition to the
hourly f01-f18 we already fetch. This extends the grid_tasks seed
from 19 rows (1 analysis + 18 forecast) to 29 rows (1 analysis +
18 hourly + 10 3-hourly), and bumps the UI forecast window
constant from 18h to 48h so the map timeline and path calculator
forecast chart automatically show the extended horizon.

No Rust logic changes needed — the pipeline is data-driven and
u8 forecast_hour already handles f48.
2026-06-10 11:36:58 -05:00

277 lines
12 KiB
Elixir
Raw Permalink Blame History

This file contains ambiguous Unicode characters

This file contains Unicode characters that might be confused with other characters. If you think that this is intentional, you can safely ignore this warning. Use the Escape button to reveal them.

defmodule MicrowavepropWeb.AboutLive do
@moduledoc "Static `/about` page — project overview, credits, contact info."
use MicrowavepropWeb, :live_view
alias Microwaveprop.Repo
@impl true
def mount(_params, _session, socket) do
{:ok,
socket
|> assign(:page_title, "About")
|> assign(:stats, fetch_stats())}
end
@impl true
def render(assigns) do
~H"""
<Layouts.app flash={@flash} current_scope={@current_scope} max_width="max-w-4xl">
<.header>
About NTMS Propagation Prediction
<:subtitle>What we're building and why.</:subtitle>
</.header>
<section class="space-y-8 text-sm leading-relaxed">
<div class="space-y-3">
<p>
Line-of-sight is wrong for the microwave bands. Every operator on
902 MHz and up has made contacts over hills, through trees, and 200 km
past the horizon — contacts that shouldn't have worked if LOS were the
whole story. What's actually going on is the lower atmosphere:
temperature inversions, humidity gradients, ducting layers, and rain
cells that bend, trap, and absorb signals in ways that change by the
hour. The window for a good contact is often minutes, not days.
</p>
<p>
Jim KM5PO started this project to try to predict those windows from
weather data. Graham W5ISP picked it up and is iterating on it from
there. The goal: a map that tells you when to get on the air, per
band, based on real atmospheric conditions and what we've learned
from the contacts you and everyone else have already made.
</p>
<div role="alert" class="alert alert-warning">
<p>
<strong>Heads up:</strong>
the scoring you see is hand-calibrated from the data we have so far.
It isn't updated in real time — I (Graham) re-fit the weights
manually when there's enough new data to move the needle. The more
contacts and beacon reports we collect, the better it gets. See the
<.link navigate={~p"/algo"} class="link link-hover font-semibold">algorithm page</.link>
for what's actually under the hood, and please <.link
navigate={~p"/submit"}
class="link link-hover font-semibold"
>submit your contacts</.link>.
</p>
</div>
<div role="alert" class="alert alert-info">
<p>
<strong>Coverage:</strong>
right now this only covers the continental US. Every upstream source
we're using — NOAA HRRR, ASOS, IEMRE, the ITU terrain data — is
CONUS-only. Hawaii, Alaska, Canada, and Mexico will need different
data sources and aren't wired up yet.
</p>
</div>
</div>
<div class="space-y-3">
<h2 class="text-xl font-bold">How it works, roughly</h2>
<p>
Two things, paired up. Most propagation tools keep them separate.
</p>
<ol class="list-decimal list-outside pl-5 space-y-2">
<li>
<strong>The weather.</strong>
Hourly 3 km HRRR forecasts give surface fields and pressure-level
profiles. We derive refractivity profiles, minimum refractivity
gradient, ducting detection, boundary-layer depth, and precipitable
water for every grid cell. ASOS surface obs, 12-hourly upper-air
soundings, and gridded IEMRE reanalysis fill in the gaps. A
10-factor composite score is written out for every 0.125° cell
across CONUS, for each hour of a 48-hour forecast.
</li>
<li>
<strong>The contacts.</strong>
{format_count(@stats.contacts)}+ amateur microwave QSOs, each
tagged with the atmosphere at both ends of the path (and along it)
at the time the contact happened. That's a ground-truth dataset we
can actually fit against — "when you had this score, how far did
the contact go, and did it happen at all?"
</li>
</ol>
<p>
The scoring is a weighted sum of ten factors: rain, humidity,
precipitable water (PWAT), season, refractivity gradient, pressure,
TTd depression, sky cover, wind, and time of day — weights
recalibrated via gradient descent against the contact dataset. The
physics changes by frequency: humidity helps at 10 GHz (more
refractivity) and hurts at 24+ GHz (absorption). Refractivity uses
native HRRR hybrid-sigma levels (1050 m resolution) for duct
detection, with a pressure-level fallback (~250 m) when the native
data isn't available.
</p>
</div>
<div class="space-y-3">
<h2 class="text-xl font-bold">What we've collected so far</h2>
<p>Straight from the production database:</p>
<div class="grid grid-cols-2 md:grid-cols-3 gap-3">
<div class="stat bg-base-200 rounded-box">
<div class="stat-title">Contacts</div>
<div class="stat-value text-xl">{format_count(@stats.contacts)}</div>
</div>
<div class="stat bg-base-200 rounded-box">
<div class="stat-title">Weather stations</div>
<div class="stat-value text-xl">{format_count(@stats.weather_stations)}</div>
</div>
<div class="stat bg-base-200 rounded-box">
<div class="stat-title">Surface observations</div>
<div class="stat-value text-xl">{format_count(@stats.surface_observations)}</div>
</div>
<div class="stat bg-base-200 rounded-box">
<div class="stat-title">Upper-air soundings</div>
<div class="stat-value text-xl">{format_count(@stats.soundings)}</div>
</div>
<div class="stat bg-base-200 rounded-box">
<div class="stat-title">HRRR profiles</div>
<div class="stat-value text-xl">{format_count(@stats.hrrr_profiles)}</div>
</div>
<div class="stat bg-base-200 rounded-box">
<div class="stat-title">IEMRE gridded obs</div>
<div class="stat-value text-xl">{format_count(@stats.iemre_observations)}</div>
</div>
<div class="stat bg-base-200 rounded-box">
<div class="stat-title">Terrain profiles</div>
<div class="stat-value text-xl">{format_count(@stats.terrain_profiles)}</div>
</div>
<div class="stat bg-base-200 rounded-box">
<div class="stat-title">Beacons</div>
<div class="stat-value text-xl">{format_count(@stats.beacons)}</div>
</div>
<div class="stat bg-base-200 rounded-box">
<div class="stat-title">Commercial link samples</div>
<div class="stat-value text-xl">{format_count(@stats.commercial_samples)}</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="space-y-3">
<h2 class="text-xl font-bold">How it's built</h2>
<ul class="list-disc list-outside pl-5 space-y-2">
<li>
Elixir / Phoenix 1.8 + LiveView for everything web-facing. Ecto
on Postgres for storage. Oban runs the background pipelines
(HRRR pulls, terrain, ASOS, soundings, IEMRE, solar indices,
commercial links).
</li>
<li>
Leaflet + Canvas tile layers for the propagation heatmap — we
render 0.125° cells at interactive frame rates. Tailwind v4 +
daisyUI for layout, esbuild for JS bundling.
</li>
<li>
Physics: ITU-R P.526-16 knife-edge + Deygout 3-edge terrain
diffraction, ITU-R P.838-3 rain attenuation, dynamic k-factor
from live HRRR refractivity gradients, great-circle geometry,
FSPL with frequency-dependent O₂ and H₂O absorption.
</li>
<li>
Data sources: NOAA HRRR (AWS S3, hourly analysis + 18 h
forecasts), Iowa Environmental Mesonet (ASOS and upper-air
soundings), IEMRE gridded reanalysis, SRTM 90 m terrain, SNMP
polling on seven commercial microwave links near DFW at 5-minute
intervals, and NCEP NARR for pre-2014 contact enrichment.
</li>
<li>
There's Nx/Axon/EXLA scaffolding for a small feed-forward model
(13 features → 64 → 32 → 1 sigmoid). Not trained yet — waiting
on enough calibrated data to not overfit.
</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="space-y-3">
<h2 class="text-xl font-bold">What's next</h2>
<ul class="list-disc list-outside pl-5 space-y-2">
<li>
<strong>Beacon calibration.</strong>
A distributed network of amateur receivers reporting CW beacon
signal levels on a schedule. Beacon submissions are already open
to anyone via the Beacons page.
</li>
<li>
<strong>Weight calibration.</strong>
Fit the 9 factor weights against recorded distances / QSO counts
per band so the score reflects real propagation, not my
intuition.
</li>
<li>
<strong>Training the model.</strong>
Once there are enough clean (contact, conditions) pairs, train
the Axon model to augment or replace the hand-tuned scoring.
</li>
<li>
<strong>Better inputs.</strong> MRMS for precipitation at 24+ GHz where rain attenuation
dominates, RTMA/URMA surface analysis blending, GOES total
precipitable water.
</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div role="alert" class="alert alert-info text-center">
<p>
If this tool is useful to you, consider
<a
href="https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/53VLBD2E67JAE"
target="_blank"
class="link font-semibold underline"
>
donating to NTMS
</a>
to help keep the project running.
</p>
</div>
</section>
</Layouts.app>
"""
end
# For tables that get huge (tens of millions of rows), using count(*) on
# every About page load is wasteful. We use PostgreSQL's pg_class.reltuples
# estimate — it's maintained by ANALYZE and is accurate to within a few
# percent, which is plenty for "big number on a marketing page."
@estimate_tables ~w(hrrr_profiles surface_observations)
defp fetch_stats do
%{
contacts: count_exact("contacts"),
weather_stations: count_exact("weather_stations"),
surface_observations: count_estimate("surface_observations"),
soundings: count_exact("soundings"),
hrrr_profiles: count_estimate("hrrr_profiles"),
iemre_observations: count_exact("iemre_observations"),
terrain_profiles: count_exact("terrain_profiles"),
beacons: count_exact("beacons"),
commercial_samples: count_exact("commercial_samples")
}
end
# Each count is wrapped individually so a missing table in dev (or a
# transient query failure) never blanks the entire dashboard. The
# previous outer try/rescue zeroed all 10 numbers if any single one
# raised — every stat read 0 on environments lacking hrrr_profiles
# or propagation_scores.
defp count_exact(table) do
case Repo.query("SELECT count(*) FROM #{table}") do
{:ok, %Postgrex.Result{rows: [[count]]}} -> count
_ -> 0
end
end
defp count_estimate(table) when table in @estimate_tables do
case Repo.query("SELECT reltuples::bigint FROM pg_class WHERE relname = $1", [table]) do
{:ok, %Postgrex.Result{rows: [[estimate]]}} -> max(estimate || 0, 0)
_ -> 0
end
end
defp format_count(n) when is_integer(n) and n >= 1_000_000 do
"#{Float.round(n / 1_000_000, 1)}M"
end
defp format_count(n) when is_integer(n) and n >= 1_000 do
"#{Float.round(n / 1_000, 1)}k"
end
defp format_count(n) when is_integer(n), do: Integer.to_string(n)
defp format_count(_), do: ""
end