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On Tue, 17 Aug 1999, Rodrigo Zerlotti wrote: > Sorry if this is trivial, but I am just a amateur trying to understand > this decoders. > > My goal is to get a raw METAR data and translate is to "plain" English. > I installed all the decoders package, including "metar2nc", which I > thought may be what I needed. > > I ran the test, everything ok, but I don't know what to do next. > > I think the process is: > 1. get the rawdata (metar) > 2. pass it thru metar2nc to convert to .nc file > 3. do something with the .nc file to see the result > > Any help, directions will be greatly appreciated. > > TIA Rodrigo, Your assumptions are correct, the details are in README.perldecoders file that contains instructions included with the release. If you use the -v flag then the log file will contain ascii description of the decoder variables. Robb... 3) General operations notes: i) metar2nc [-v] metar.cdl [dataDir] [yymm] uses station file: sfmetar_sa.tbl ii) buoy2nc [-v] buoy.cdl [dataDir] iii) ua2nc [-v] ua.cdl [dataDir] [yymm] uses station file: snworld.tbl iv) syn2nc [-v] syn.cdl [dataDir] [yymm] uses station file: systns_upc.tbl where -v Verbose flag; logs each expanded report in log file. Use for testing only; creates large log files. cdl file Required, contains all the meteorological variables; self documenting. dataDir Data directory; default is current directory. For netCDF output files. yymm The year and month; default is current year and month. Decoders expect input on stdin, exit in 20 minutes if no activity. Decoders create files ending with 'lst' that designate the list of currently processed reports and the record number in the file. Each decoder also creates files ending with 'Log.nc' that show the status of the decoder. The data files have the following format: yymmddhh_{decoder name}.nc > > Rodrigo > =============================================================================== Robb Kambic Unidata Program Center Software Engineer III Univ. Corp for Atmospheric Research address@hidden WWW: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/ ===============================================================================