20040821: Level II Radar (was: Re: NNEXRAD Feed)

>From: "Kevin R. Tyle" <address@hidden>
>Organization: SUNY Albany
>Keywords: 200408211604.i7LG4YXn021535 IDD CRAFT

Hi Kevin,

>This reminds me, we still have not begun receiving Level II
>data.  A few months ago, Jeff Weber had mentioned that they
>were still working on finalizing the Level II topology.  I
>assume that has been done?  Whom should we use as our
>top-level Level II sites (primary / secondary)?

First, let me apologize for not having gotten back to you on this.

Please use storm.plymouth.edu as your primary feed site.  Also, please
use bigbird.tamu.edu as your secondary feed site for the moment.  Your
secondary feed site _will_ change in the future.

The topology for the CRAFT data relay is still not finished mainly
because the top tier sites selected by the NWS are not yet _fully_
functional ("operational") and because some Unidata universities are
still considering whether or not they have the capacity to relay all of
the CRAFT data.  TAMU is not in the latter category, however, nor
is Plymouth State.

>Gerry:  maybe we can use TAMU for Level II until we hear what
>our preferred upstream sites will be.  Can you let us know how we
>should configure our ldmd.conf to receive the feed?

The request line in ldmd.conf will look like:

request CRAFT   ".*"    storm.plymouth.edu      PRIMARY

If you want to receive a subset of the feed, you should use the LDM
'notifyme' utility to see what the CRAFT product headers look like:

notifyme -vxl- -f CRAFT -o 3600 -h storm.plymouth.edu

and then create a regular expression that gets the station(s)
you need.  Here is one example that gets all the CRAFT data
from the KFTG and KAMA NEXRADs:

request CRAFT   "K(FTG|AMA)"    storm.plymouth.edu

One word of caution.  storm.plymouth.edu is being fed from the top
level NWS relay at the GigaPoP at the University of Maryland (the
MAX).  It, in turn, is receiving data from the NWS topology which
includes just those stations that are running Build 5 software.  This
is still a subset of the stations being gathered by the CRAFT network,
so some stations may be missing from the feed that Plymouth is
ingesting.  TAMU, on the other hand, is feeding all CRAFT stations from
OU.  So, until the NWS gets all stations onto their distribution
network, you may be better off feeding from TAMU (bigbird.tamu.edu)
than Plymouth (storm.plymouth.edu).

Many thanks are owed to Gerry Creager of TAMU and Jim Koermer of
Plymouth State for their agreeing to act as second tier relay nodes for
the Level II data!  This is a non-trivial undertaking!!

>Thanks,

No worries.

Cheers,

Tom
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