Re: 20010503: New VGF product

Oh my goodness.  :)  I'll try this out.  That's exactly what is needed.  I'm 
off to
Atlanta, so I'll be getting to this as time permits.  NCDC is finally 
submitting to
using n-awips in "operations".  (for the NWS legal data archive requirements).  
So,
this will help.  As you may know, I did a proposal to establish our NOAAPort 
feed
here which works fine.  (with much help from FSL).   Anyway- since NOAAPort has 
no
backup, they still ask for files from the NWSTG, and they (TG) concatenate the
files like this.  Thank you very much Steve- well done.  Glenn

Steve Chiswell wrote:

> >From: "Glenn Rutledge" <address@hidden>
> >Organization: NCDC
> >Keywords: 200105031513.f43FDwp17256
> >
> >
> > Steve,
> > Thanks much for the redbook soultions.  It's now finally working.  I've
> > just been asked if I can plot the attached "redbook" graphic file NCDC
> > receives form the NWS OSO servers (I think).  I can't make any sense of
> > the data just looking at it (don't know how the create these files, or
> > wheter they even have headers- I think they concatenate many products
> > into single files).
> >
> > My questions is, how would you try and run the redbook "decoder" on this
> > file?   Thx much  Glenn
> >
> >
> >
>
> Glenn,
>
> The GEMPAK redbook graphics library routines are not set up to look
> for more than 1 product in a file. Also, as you suspected, the file
> you sent doesn't contain a transmission header like the products on
> the NOAAPORT broadcast do, so my dcredbook program isn't going
> to solve your problem.
>
> The best solution I can offer you is a short program to dump out the
> individual redbook graphics products from what I found by looking through
> the file you sent me. Its an example- you might have to tweak later
> depending on your data files since I only had a small sample of data to
> look at. After you dump out the individual redbook graphics
> to separate files, you can either use dcredbook on each individually
> to create a separate vgf file, or use GPMAP to draw each graphic to a common 
> or
> separate files.
>
>
> The attatchment you sent me had 4 redbook products contained within it.
> The products (not really a coherent set of products!) were:
> 1) severe weather reports
> 2) day2 convective outlook
> 3) 96 hour 500mb heigh lables
> 4) 72 hour 500mb heigh lables
>
> The separator between each product seemed to be:
> #### some_numbers ####
> So, I created the attatched parse.c program (compile with cc -o parse parse.c)
> to take the pieces (keying on the 4 "#" characters) and wrap them with
> a FOS header and trailer and dump out to separate files.
>
> Running "parse glenn.dat" (glenn.dat was your attatched file) gives me
> 4 files:
> 7408 May 15 12:43 redbook_0.dat
> 1110 May 15 12:43 redbook_1.dat
> 6652 May 15 12:43 redbook_2.dat
> 6478 May 15 12:43 redbook_3.dat
>
> From here, I can run each through dcredbook to create vgf files:
>
>  % set FILES=`ls redbook_*.dat`
>  % foreach FILE ($FILES)
>  %    cat $FILE | dcredbook_vg -d - 'VG|%P-YYYYMMDDHH.vgf'
>  % end
>
>
> Or, here is an example script for running GPMAP (set the DEVICE to xw, vg etc
> depending on your needs!)
>
> #!/bin/csh -f
> #
> # Sample script to plot all files named redbook_*.dat using gpmap.
> # Each redbook graphic file will be plotted in a separate color.
>
> set FILES=`ls redbook_*.dat`
>
> @ CNT = 0
> @ LINE_COLOR = 6
>
> foreach FILE ($FILES)
>
> if($CNT == 0) then
>    set CLEAR=yes
> else
>    set CLEAR=no
> endif
>
> gpmap << EOF
>  MAP      = 1
>  GAREA    = AFNA
>  PROJ     = str/90;-105;0
>  SATFIL   =
>  RADFIL   =
>  LATLON   = 0
>  PANEL    = 0
>  TITLE    = 1
>  TEXT     = 1
>  CLEAR    = $CLEAR
>  DEVICE   = XW
>  LUTFIL   =
>  STNPLT   =
>  VGFILE   =
>  AFOSFL   =
>  AWPSFL   = $FILE
>  LINE     = $LINE_COLOR
>  WATCH    =
>  WARN     =
>  HRCN     =
>  ISIG     =
>  LTNG     =
>  ATCF     =
>  AIRM     =
>  NCON     =
>  SVRL     =
>  r
>
>  e
> EOF
>
> @ CNT = $CNT + 1
> @ LINE_COLOR = $LINE_COLOR - 1
> if($LINE_COLOR == 1) @ LINE_COLOR = 30
>
> end
>
> ############### end of csh script ##################
>
> Hope this helps.
> Steve Chiswell
> Unidata User SUpport
>
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>   ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>                  Name: parse.c
>    parse.c       Type: Plain Text (TEXT/PLAIN)
>              Encoding: BASE64
>           Description: parse.c
>
>                        Name: glenn.dat
>                        Type: unspecified type (APPLICATION/octet-stream)
>    glenn.dat       Encoding: BASE64
>                 Description: glenn.dat
>             Download Status: Not downloaded with message