[GEMPAK #BLM-824680]: Gempak - gpnexr2

Heather,

>Hi, I want to use gpnexr2 to plot level II NEXRAD data downloaded from NCDC. 
>This program >works fine for data from 2005 or later, but gives the following 
>error for any of the >earlier datasets I\'ve tried:
>Can\'t read station ID from file, %SITE% not found in template

The older Level 2 files do not contain any station location information in them.
There are files identified by the string "ARCHIVE2." at the beginning
(you will see this if you run "od -c radar_file | head"). Newer files which
do contain the station location information have the string "AR2V001".

If your files do not have the station ID information in them, you must 
provide the station id in the file name so that the program can determine where 
to 
plot the data on a map. Gpnexr2 can use the NEXRII template found in 
$GEMTBL/config/datatype.tbl to speciify the file name template that will
be used for the data so that it knows where in the file name the string
is that contaiins the station information. The expected template is
%SITE%_YYYYMMDD_HHNN. If your files do not match this, you will get the error
message you mention.

If your radar data is from KRAX for example, you would name your files such as:
KRAX_20060221_1215

Using this file name convention, you can use RADFIL=NEXRII|KRAX
to find your data in the current working directory. You can specify
the time of the file to be use in the RADTIM variable such as
060221/1215.

If your files are in a different directory, then you need to use
the directory template in datatype.tbl, which is set to
$RAD/craft/%SITE%
so your file would be expected to be found under 
$RAD/craft/%SITE%/%SITE%_YYYYMMDD_HHNN.

You can specify a filename in RADFIL instead of using the NEXRII template, but
if you do, the file name must conform to the NEXRII template so
that te %SITE% string can be negotiated.

Steve Chiswell
Unidata User Support


Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: BLM-824680
Department: Support GEMPAK
Priority: Normal
Status: Closed