No Designator for Certain Forecast Times (fwd)

===============================================================================
Robb Kambic                                Unidata Program Center
Software Engineer III                      Univ. Corp for Atmospheric Research
address@hidden             WWW: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/
===============================================================================

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2005 23:34:45 -0500
From: Jordan Gerth <address@hidden>
To: Robb Kambic <address@hidden>
     decoders <address@hidden>
Subject: No Designator for Certain Forecast Times

Hello Mr. Kambic,

T+126, T+138, T+150, T+162, and T+174 hours (where T is the forecast 
initialization time) all use the letter Z in place of their forecast hour 
designator in the header's fourth octet. Looking at Appendix A of WMO Bulletin 
Headers, I do not see any other way to break these up by their forecast hour. 
As a result, they are all being saved/amended to the same file in the same 
folder, which is problematic for their conversion into AWIPS netCDF format. The 
converter I have only reads the first entry (T+126) and then quits, believing 
the end of the forecast hour is the end of the file.

Limiting it to Z is an insufficient matter of accomplishing this problem, not 
matter how many files I make (they are all Z, so each entry catches every one). 
The only fix would seem to be looking outside of the heading and focusing on 
the GRIB PDS. How does "> ldmadmin watch" get the forecast time (F###)?

Ref. Table A.3 - http://www.nco.ncep.noaa.gov/pmb/docs/on388/appendixa.html

Meteorologically,

Jordan Gerth