20010111: snow upgraded to Unidata McIDAS-X 7.701 (cont.)

>From: Jim Koermer <address@hidden>
>Organization: Unidata Program Center
>Keywords: 200101080056.f080uCo08251 Unidata McIDAS install

Jim,

>Thanks for upgrading snow. The only problem that I had was that one of
>my scripts used the old svgif.k program and I can't seem to get svf.k to
>do what I want. This also happened with the previous version.
>Fortunealy, I had an old copy of svgif.k around and I copied it to the
>/mcidas/bin directory and it works fine.

SVGIF has been replaced by the much more powerful FRMSAVE routine.
While SVGIF only saved McIDAS image/graphic frame contents as GIF (tm)
files, FRMSAVE can save in a variety of formats (GIF, JPEG, PostScript
(tm), etc.).  I strongly suggest changing your script(s) to use
frmsave.k.  This is a very simple change (virtually the same command
line syntax for GIF file saving), so it won't take hardly any time.

>I'll talk to you about this in
>ABQ, next week. Sorry, I couldn't get back to you sooner, but overseeing
>the final touches on five student papers and my own for next week has
>kept me busy.

No problem.  I have to go in and work on my presentation in a few minutes
as well.

>I also have been busy getting the new NIDS data up and running. I've
>added a NIDS option to our "Make  Your Own..." page, which is ideal when
>you have so many sites and six products for each site. Now that we seem
>to have overcome our previos NOAAPORT receive problems, our data receipt
>on all channels has been excellent.

In poking around on snow, I found that the NEXRAD Level III (aka NIDS)
products seemed to be available under the /data/noaaport1 directory.
Based on this, I setup ADDE access to those images right after I
upgraded snow to 7.7x.

>We had a good trip home except for forgetting that there was a Bruins
>game in downtown Boston, so it took 45 minutes to get through the
>tunnel--bummer!

Bean town loves their hockey!

>Dedication went superbly. I've attached a newspaper article about the
>event.

Thanks for including the attachment.

>I ingest the McIDAS data on cyclone.plymouth.edu. To get onboard telnet
>as ldm.  I keep the mcidas data in /data/mcidas-c.

OK, thanks for the information.

>I'm not sure how LDM
>and XCD work or if it's just a pointing issue like the GINI data. If
>it's a pointing issue, here's the layout of the important nwstg
>directories NFS's to cyclone:
>
>       /data/noaaport1/data - contains conventional surface and ua obs
>       /data/noaaport1/model - contains model fields
>       /data/noaaport/nids - contains all station directories containing all
>NIDS
>                              compressed products

Actually, XCD process run from the LDM directly, not from disk files.
I will setup XCD processing as I get time.

>Let me know if you need anything else. I'll see you next week.

I did login to cyclone this morning (over coffee) and FTPed the latest
7.7x release.  I then ran into a couple of small things in trying to
build the distribution (no f2c that I could find on cyclone), but I
overcame them (FTPed the f2c stuff from snow and put it in
/home/mcidas/f2c and edited some of the McIDAS build files) and built
7.7x (just ended I see).

I will wait to install this new version until I have enough time to
setup XCD.  This will unfortunately have to wait until after AMS.  See
you in ABQ.

Tom