19990218: GRDDISP needs ability to specify LATEST forecast is desired

>From: Robert Mullenax <address@hidden>
>Organization: NMSU/NSBF
>Keywords: 199902181909.MAA13269 McIDAS GRDDISP ADDE

Robert,

>I have been frustrated by the fact that when you use GRDDISP to display
>model data, you have to explicitly give the model run time.  For example,
>if the latest RUC run is 15Z, and you do not give TIME=15, you will
>get the results from the 12Z run.  Is there some way to make it default
>to the latest run(for use in scripts, etc.)?

From my perspective, one of the shortcomings of the way ADDE was cast
was the inability to specify a time as LATEST.  Since we felt that the
concept of LATEST was important/useful, we used the ability of both big
and little endian systems to access SYSKEY.TAB to our purpose.  Of
course, the way we did this was to modify decoders to update SYSKEY.TAB
with the information about the time of the most recently received data,
what file it was in, and the day for which it was valid.  I have not
extended this use to the XCD GRID decoder since there is currently no
way to access an ADDE server's copy of SYSKEY.TAB remotely (that is to
say the copy of SYSKEY.TAB that the remote decoders are updating).  I
have mulled over a couple of different ways of doing this (an ADDE
SYSKEY.TAB server and writing the data currently written to SYSKEY.TAB
to a TEXT file that can be accessed remotely by the READ command), but
I have not implemented anything yet.  Even if such a facility was developed,
it would not do exactly what you are asking about.  The process of plotting
the most recent data would be a two step one: interrogate the server to
find out what is LATEST, and then providing that information to the
ADDE application that is to be run.

If you have any thoughts on this important topic, I would _love_ to hear
them!

>Thanks,

Sorry I couldn't provide better news.  Talk to you later...

Tom