20050909: NMAP2 bug or Operator error?

Kevin,

Inserted below.....


On Tue, 2005-08-09 at 12:23, Kevin Polston wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am having a couple of problems with displaying items in NMAP2....I am 
> using the version 5.8.3a.
> 
> The first "issue" I am having is with the color of the watch boxes. I 
> prefer to have them as either "blue" for severe thunderstorm or "red" 
> for tornado. I do not have the color code option checked in the date 
> selection gui, yet the watch boxes still come out with different 
> colors. I went and edited the miscset.tbl file and commented out the 
> entries for the colored watch options 0-9.  When I restarted NMAP2 it 
> worked good.  However, I made a procedure to restore the loops (an SPF 
> file) and whne I re-started NMAP2 again this time the watch boxes would 
> not appear at all. So I restored the miscset.tbl file back to the way 
> it was and the watch boxes appeared again.....but yet no matter what 
> options I choose in the gui window...the multi-colored watches are 
> there.  Is there some other table or file I am not setting up right or 
> is this a minor bug?  I cerftainly am stumped.
> 

1) Make sure you are only using the version of miscset.tbl that
came with the version you are using. If you are reading
an old table, then the options won't match with what the code is
expecting. Do not delete any lines- things won't work. Don't
use an old version with local changes- you should fold your changes
into the new version (the code that reads the settings expects a 
centain number of lines and types to match the gui menu, and when new
versions add new features the table reading changes).

The miscset.tbl has for WTCH: 
FLAG Color Code               0 

That means that the default will be us just use the standard cyan and
red colors as defined above:
TYPE Thunderstorm             1/6
TYPE Tornado                  1/2



> My second "issue" I am having is with regards to creating an objective 
> analysis grid and being able to display it in NMAP2. I can display the 
> created grid files using GDPLOT2 from the command line, but whenever I 
> try to view those grids in NMAP2 I see no options in the data selection 
> window. When I try to overlay the grids onto an image, I get the error 
> message "invalid data subcategory".  I have my data category and 
> subcategory listed as   CAT GRID and  SCAT FCT     which seems to me to 
> be the right listing for viewing a gridded data file.  I have thought 
> about what the problem could be, I cheked permissions and paths and so 
> forth but it seems to me that if the grids are being created (obviously 
> they are since I can see them using GDPLOT2) then there is something 
> else that is either not working or I have not set up properly.  One 
> thing I have not tried to do yet is create another grid file and see 
> what happens, especially if I locate it in a different directory. Other 
> than that, what else is there to do?
> 

If you create an objective analysis of observational data, then the
times are analysis times (eg, gdinfo shows the DATTIM, not a GDATTIM
with a forecast Fxxx part to the time). These would have
subcategory SCAT_ANL (sort of picky, but you want the time line to show
you the analysis times up to present, rather than forecast times
from present into the future.

Assuming you do an OABSFC, with SFPARM=PMSL, and being written to a file
whose template in datatype.tbl is SFCA, then a mod_res.tbl entry would
look like:
pmsl    $NMAP_RESTORE/obj/surface/pmsl      OA_SFC          sfca

Then your gdplot2 function "pmsl" would reside in
$NMAP_RESTORE/obj/surface/pmsl. Very inportant that you don't include
GDATTIM in the NMAP2 restore file- otherwise, if you did, it would
override the time widget (which you don't want to do). You probably want
to create new restore files for objective analysis grids, rather than
use those created for models which might have GDATTIM=allf000 since
the f000 won't exist in the analyses.

Steve Chiswell
Unidata User Support



> I hope you have some suggestions.....and thanks as always for your help.
> 
> 
> Kevin Polston
> Senior Instructor, NWSTC
> Kansas City MO 64152
> 
> 816-880-9314 ext 273