[GEMPAK #LAW-267067]: METAR/SPECI updates

Rob,

I have several suggestions depending on what you want to do with the
individual metar observations.

To view on your desktop, the NWX gui can display the raw metar and speci
reports for a station or all stations in a state for a the last N hours.
The Autoupdate feature will keep these updated on the display (the default 
time for refresh is 300 seconds in $GEMPAK/source/programs/gui/nwx/auto.c, but
can be recompiled to a shorter time interval).

The SFLIST program can be run (or invoked in a cron or cgi) to output the
raw observations in the dcmetr decoded file using SFPARM=text;spcl

Alternatively, if you really are looking for a solution such as the nalarm 
directory of
observations, I have a simple awk script to run from the LDM rather than having 
to configure
a separate pqsurf.conf and separate queue. I've attached he script to this 
message and can
be installed as ~ldm/util/metar_obs.awk


WMO     ^S[AP]
        PIPE    /usr/bin/awk -v OUTDIR=data/gempak/alarms/gempak -f 
util/metar_obs.awk

In the above, the location of awk may be /bin or /usr/bin on most systems. 
Also, if the 
awk executable is oawk (eg solaris) rather than gawk or nawk, then use gawk or 
nawk explitly.

A list of stations can be defined in the script to search for in the piped SA 
and SP
bulletins. This script just keys on the 4 letter ICAO in the text, rather than 
making
specific assumptions about the format of a bulletin (eg, it would match that 
string anywhere
not just if it is a valid ICAO....but luckily most ICAO identifiers don't match
many words).

Steve Chiswell
Unidata User Support





> 
> I'm using GEMPAK - what I previously did was set a pqact.conf line for
> "MTRLAN" as the AWIPS header, and had that sent to the data/gempak/alarms
> directory for nalarm. Since KLAN is now in a "collective" instead of on its
> own, I was using pqsurf to pull it out individually. If you've got a better
> method I'll take it!
> 
> - Rob
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Steve Emmerson [mailto:address@hidden]
> > Sent: Monday, April 09, 2007 8:09 PM
> > To: Rob Dale
> > Subject: Re: PQSURF incoming question
> >
> > Rob,
> >
> > > I have the following set up in PQSURF.CONF to save METARs from my
> > local
> > > station... It is saving the hourly reports, but not specials. Any
> > idea what
> > > I need to grab SPECIs?
> > >
> > > IDS|DDS ^(metar KLAN|speci KLAN) ([0-3][0-9])([0-2][0-9])
> > >         FILE    data/gempak/alarms/nawips/MTRLAN
> >
> > The "pqsurf" program is deprecated --- we really don't advise people to
> > use it.  Are you using the McIDAS or GEMPAK packages?  If so, then you
> > don't need to split-out the individual station reports because those
> > packages do that automatically.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Steve Emmerson
> 


Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: LAW-267067
Department: Support GEMPAK
Priority: Low
Status: Closed

Attachment: metar_obs.awk
Description: Binary data