20010821: McIDAS: map overlays bar and refresh problems (cont.)

>From: Christian Page <address@hidden>
>Organization: Universite du Quebec a Montreal
>Keywords: 200108161336.f7GDaa129316 McIDAS scripts

Christian,

re: BAR and MAP lines are graphics colors
>Thanks, I adjusted the bar labels color and map color easily (gray for
>infra-red and magenta for visible).

OK.

re: FRMLABEL vs ZA
>I need the placeholders, so I can live with non-black-and-white FRMLABEL to
>gain access to placeholders. It is better than ZA because of placeholders.

Sounds good.

re: default for wait.k is 5 seconds which may be excessive
>I did adjust to 3 secs, and it still works perfectly.

You could probably cut it down to 1 second, but it probably doesn't matter
that much anyway.

re: resolution of GOES GINI images
>I thought that GOES-8 generated images each 15 minutes, not 30 minutes. at
>NCAR they generate GOES-8 images each 15 minutes
>http://www.rap.ucar.edu/weather/satellite/

OK, my comment was based on the GINI images in NOAAPORT.  The ADDE
servers are giving you access to this data, and that feed only has
half-hourly imagery.  RAP's display comes from imagery captured by a
TeraScan system, so they have all of the data coming down from GOES.
When we get a bigger machine installed at SSEC, we will probably have
access to the higher temporal resolution data as well.

>Another quick question. I tried to find the answer in the docs, but couldn't
>find what I needed exactly. I want to output the valid time of the satellite
>image in a text file. I saw that there is a TFILE function, but this output a
>text frame in a text file. The valid time of the image is accessible through
>FRMLABEL. But this writes to the graphic frame, not the text frame. How can I
>recover this info?

There are a couple of different ways of doing this:

o you can do a listing of the image of interest using IMGLIST and save the
  text output to a file using the DEV= keyword.  DEV= is a global keyword;
  it works with all commands.  Here is an example:

  IMGLIST GINIEAST/GE4KIR DEV=T textfile.out

  textfile.out is a name of your choosing except that I think that it
  has to follow the 8.3 naming convention (base name be no longer than
  8 characters; suffix be no more than 3)

o after you load an image, you can use FRMLIST to list the contents of
  a frame and save that information to a text file again using DEV=.

  IMGDISP GINIEAST/GE4KIR 1
  FRMLIST 1 DEV=T textfile.out

o finally, if the image was in a local file, and if was in AREA format
  then you could use the LWU command to list out information from its
  header.  For sake of argument, lets assume that the image was in
  AREA2001:

  LWU LIST AREA2001 0 64

  The nominal time of an image when stored in AREA file format can
  be found in word 4 (zero based).  A shorter list from LWU would
  be:

  LWU LIST AREA2001 4 5

  Again, this output can be saved to a file with the DEV= keyword.

You can find out more about the DEV= keyword in the Appendix A: Global Keywords
in the McIDAS User's Guide:

http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/mcidas/780/users_guide/McHTML-1.HTML

>Also, is there a way to have lowercase output with FRMLABEL? It seems that all
>text is converted to upper-case.

The way that FRMLABEL annotates allows for upper case characters only.

>Thanks a lot for your great support,

Glad to hear that things are working well for you.  By the way, have you
upgraded to Version 7.80 yet?

Tom