20010323: McIDAS-X, my friday problem for this week

>From: alan anderson <address@hidden>
>Organization: St. Cloud State
>Keywords: 200103232054.f2NKsZL14821 McIDAS-X Fkey MCGUI sounding

Alan,

>Another question/gripe about mcidasx.

You really should stop going into work on Fridays :-)

>Looking at the list of 
>upper air stations (on gui: display, obs., thermo. diagrams, RAOB
>STN IDN) the table of stations includes several locations where 
>the city name is listed, but no station number id.  
>As a result of NWS reorganiztion over the past several years, 
>some raob locations are now at cities that are not easily 
>recognized in terms of geography, e.g.
>
>    white lake MI   for the  Detroit MI area
>
>    chanhassen MN   for the  Minneapolis MN area
>
>Without a matching Station Id  No., these city names are
>a barrier in recognizing what site to go and look at if you 
>want a raob for a certain region.  You can find the nearest 
>raob for any geographical region, but the raob is listed by
>station no.  This list does not match station nos. to
>cities for all the sites.

You are absolutely correct.  The current scheme for specifying the station
for a sounding does not allow one to input the station IDN or ID.  Given
that some stations do not have IDs, the interface should allow the user
to select by ID or IDN.  I will address this in the next addendum.

>We are enjoying another puff of clean Canadian air here today.
>Nice to not have anyone upstream from you.

We had spectacularly clear air down here in the mountains yesterday.
The air was so clean that it looked like distant peaks were only a
few feet away.  I attributed the great air to wide spread subsidence,
but I didn't think about it too hard given that I was skiing at the time.

Tom