20000706: gempak sfmod command

Donna,

Its ok to have several reports from the same "station" in a ship file
(presumably the aircraft is at a different location 10 minutes later
when that report is made). Your sfoutf extension sounds like a ship
file...so I'm presuming that both are...but I probably need to look
at ne of your input files: 99061000_pir.sfc and see the
commands you used to create the surface file in sfcfil.

If you could ftp the input file to ~gbuddy/incoming, I'll take a look.

Steve Chiswell
Unidata User Support



>From: address@hidden
>Organization: UCAR/Unidata
>Keywords: 200007061910.e66JAaT23989

>We have a large number of GEMPAK files with pilot reports which we got from
>the Aviation Weather Center.  I can send you a sample file if you would like
>to see it.  We would like to combine these into several
>large files so they are not as cumbersome to work with.  Our strategy is
>to create a new file with SFCFIL and move data into it with SFMOD.  We
>created the new file using a packing file I made up based on what information
>I could gather about the data from AWC.  I can send you the packing file if
>you would like to see it.  When we run SFMOD we get
>
> SFFILE    Surface data file                 99061000_pir.sfc
> SFOUTF    Output surface file               nturb.shp
> DATTIM    Date/time                         /00
> AREA      Data area                         dset
> Parameters requested: SFFILE,SFOUTF,DATTIM,AREA.
> GEMPAK-SFMOD>r
> [SFMOD -4]  Time 990610/0000 cannot be added.
> Parameters requested: SFFILE,SFOUTF,DATTIM,AREA.
> GEMPAK-SFMOD> 
>
>Normally, when I see this error message I assume the output file is full but
>since this is the first file we are processing, that cannot be the case.  No
>data are actually written to the output file.  The
>files from AWC contain a number of instances where the same station reports
>several times an hour (e.g. a pilot reports moderate turbulence and 10 
>minutes later reports severe turbulence - the AWC GEMPAK files have these
>reports listed at the same time).  I wonder if this is screwing up the
>process or if it is something else.  Any ideas on what could be wrong or
>what we can do to work around it?
>
>Donna Tucker                      http://chinook.phsx.ukans.edu/tucker.html
>address@hidden      Department of Physics and Astronomy  
>(785) 864-4738 (new area code!)    University of Kansas                 
>(785) 864-5262 (fax)               Lawrence, KS  66045-2151                   
>  
>