20010531: decoding model output data in McIDAS (cont.)

>From: "Wayne Bresky" <address@hidden>
>Organization: Cornell
>Keywords: 200105161402.f4GE2Jp07535 ADDE

Wayne,

I logged onto your machine and poked around for the lack of GRID decoding
in XCD (this took awhile since I tried several things before hitting on
the answer).

The short answer is that your XCD binary ingestor, ingebin.k, was not
functioning.  Given this, no data was ever written to the output spool
file HRS.SPL (in /var/data/mcidas|xcd).  Since there was never any
spool file, the spool pointer file GRIBDEC.PRO never had a valid first
word (the actual pointer into the spool), and DMGRID would exit as
a result (hence the defunct dmgrid.k process).

I tried rebuilding ingebin.k, but the f2c routine needed (converts
Fortran source to C source) could not be found.  In desparation, I
FTPed a copy of ingebin.k from a build on a RedHat 6.2 machine here at
Unidata (I realize that you are running 7.0, but 6.2 binaries work
under 7.x).  I replaced the version of ingebin.k with the newly FTPed
version and things immediately started working: HRS.SPL was created;
GRIBDEC.PRO was updated correctly; and GRID files began getting
created.

Given the above, I would recommend:

o installing f2c (or locating it)
o loading in the most recent addendum for Unidata McIDAS
o rebuilding your McIDAS distribution

EXCEPT that I will be putting together the 7.8 distribution in the next
two months, and your system is not in dire need of the upgrade (things
appear to be working).

Please let me know if problems crop up.

Tom