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Re: 19990131: combining ship and surface files

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  • Subject: Re: 19990131: combining ship and surface files
  • Date: Mon, 08 Feb 1999 1:12:32 EST
Steve:
   Your method for combining the sfc and ship data worked great.  I am now
creating hourly analyses of pressure and temperature over North America and
adjacent coastal waters.  Except for occasional bad ship reports, the 
analyses look good.  For convenience, we view these analyses using GARP and
overlay the surface obs over land.  It's so nice to be able to zoom anywhere.
   One thing I noticed in doing this is that the reports from Vegreville,
Alberta (WVI) are consistently bad (way off both pressure and temperature).
Since I was unable to eliminate the report from my .sf file (even after
removing the station from the sf_metar.tbl file), I eliminated it in a 
preliminary fortran program in the analysis script which I use to filter
out missing data.  Actually, I am using altimeter setting over land and
pmsl over the water where altm is not available.  Although the altm
values are a little different, I like the analyses better probably because 
there are more stations that report altm than pmsl. I still use the name
pmsl for the combined dataset values (in the test.gem file you suggested).
   The only irritating problem is that in using garp, I can't always depend
on automatically getting a 4-mb contour interval for pmsl. I created a
new fdf file called MSLPress_Sfc_mb in which I set pres_cint = 4 hoping that
that would set the default contour interval, but the cint I get varies from 
one use to another.  I created a new modellabel called SfcPlot to allow me 
to view the objective analysis grids with Garp for the modelkey 'sfc'.
   Thanks again for your help with combining the sfc and ship/buoy data.
   Thanks again for your help in combining the .sf and .sb data.

   Bob