20001002: upgrading to the ldm-mcidas pnga2area decoder (cont.)

>From: Erick Lorenz <address@hidden>
>Organization: UC Davis
>Keywords: 200009220039.e8M0dBb07890 McIDAS-XCD UWGRID Fkey

Erick,

re: GRID files now being logged
>So should GRID and MD files be showing up in ROUTE LIST?

No.  The routing table entries only show what decode activities of
ldm-mcidas decoders.  This now includes pnga2area, nldn2md, proftomd,
and nids2area.  The XCD created files (MDXX and GRID) are not
"monitored" through routing table entries.  Instead, you can run either
STAT (stat.k) or statdisp to see what is going. STAT gives a single
snapshot of decoding.  statdisp pops up a window that gets updated
every so often to show you what is being processed.

>Also my attempts to plot forcasts from the f-key menu meet with "no grid
>file" errors.

That section of the Fkey menu was setup to work on Unidata-Wisconsin
GRID files.  Since there are no more GRID files coming through the UW
stream, it won't work as expected.  It can, however, be pressed into
partial service by each user adjusting a couple of McIDAS strings in
his/her session.  The strings that need to be changed are ?MODEL1 and
?MODEL2.  ?MODEL1 should be set to point at NGM GRID dataset elements,
and ?MODEL2 should be set to point at AVN dataset elements.

Try the following:

TE ?MODEL1 RTGRIDS/NGM
TE ?MODEL2 RTGRIDS/AVN

Then go back to the Fkey menu and try putting up some plots.  Again,
not all things will be accessible through the Fkey menu.  In
particular, the wind speed plots at the 250 mb level will not be
available.

The other alternative is that you could use the Bourne shell script,
uwgrid.sh, that is included in the distribution to recreate the GRID
files that used to be in the broadcast.  If you decide to do this, then
user's ?MODEL1 and ?MODEL2 strings need to be kept as they are
currently defined:

TE ?MODEL1 RTGRIDS/NGM-UW
TE ?MODEL2 RTGRIDS/AVN-UW

For more information, please look through the top of the uwgrid.sh file
and read the online help for UWGRID.  uwgrid.sh gets installed in the
~mcidas/workdata directory.  It needs to be configured to match your
setup in the same way that batch.k, xcd_run, and mcscour.sh were
configured.

The other thing to do is to look through our McIDAS inquiry tracking
system using Fkey or UWGRID as search keys.  I have helped a couple of
other sites setup cron creation of the old UW stream GRID files, and
the interactions we had are detailed in the messages in the tracking
system:

http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/glimpsedocs/ghmcidas.html

FYI, I will be in the office tomorrow, but I will be on travel for the
rest of the week.

Tom