20030820: FW: ualist

>From: McIDAS Help Desk <address@hidden>
>Organization: TASC
>Keywords: 200308201138.h7KBccLd008934 McIDAS-X UALIST

Hi Barry,

The difference between your/Rick's approach and mine is not major, but
I just thought I would explain why I suggested the approach that I
did.

I suggested using MKRAOBID instead of STNLIST since MKRAOBID creates a
list of stations that are actually reporting data for the particular
time period;  STNLIST TYPE=R returns a list of all stations that might
be releasing rawinsondes.  I use MKRAOBID to generate a list of upper
air stations that is used in my MCGUI.  The idea was that the user
could regenerate the list of reporting stations routinely (e.g., by
cron) and so always have an up to date list of sites that have data
that can be plotted.

As far as Rick's McBASI script goes, MKRAOBID could be substituted
nicely for the STNLIST invocation at the top.

Again, the differences in our approaches is not large.  It just
goes to show -- as always -- that there always seems to be multiple
ways of accomplishing a goal using McIDAS :-)

Cheers,

>In his message, Tom provided several good suggestions, including ways to
>obtain a list of RAOB stations using their MKRAOBID routine and to
>redirect the output from all the UALIST commands into a single file.
>
>Here's another method: Obtain a station list with STNLIST TYPE=R and
>keywords like LAT= and LON= or CO=US (for CONUS, you'll have to remove
>the Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Guam stations). Then use McBASI to
>read in the stations as input into multiple UALIST commands.
>
>Rick Kohrs provided the following McBASI program to do this.
>
>-----  begin  -----
>rem
>rem --- Create list of RAOB stations
>rem
>     keyin "STNLIST CO=US TYPE=R DEV=T RAOB.STN R"
>
>rem
>rem --- Loop through all the stations
>rem
>     open "RAOB.STN",10
>     input @10,a$
>     input @10,a$
>10   input @10,a$
>     if mid$(a$,1,4)=EOF$ close 10 : stop
>     if mid$(a$,1,4)="Numb" close 10 : stop
>     s$ = mid$(a$,1,5)
>     keyin "UALIST "; s$ ;" 12 2001274 ANA=NO DAT=ARPS/DATA.3
>ARPS/DATA.4 CO=US
>rem     print "UALIST "; s$ ;" 12 2001274 ANA=NO DAT=ARPS/DATA.3
>ARPS/DATA.4 CO=US
>     goto 10
>-----  end  -----
>
>Between these and Tom's suggestions I hope you'll be able to make
>something work.
>
>Barry

Tom

>From address@hidden Wed Aug 20 11:34:15 2003

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the reply. I didn't catch the significance of the word
"reporting" when I first read MKRAOBID does. But now that I know, I can
see where it makes MKRAOBID valuable. I'm sure the user appreciates
always receiving actual data from UALIST instead of "No observations
found for selection conditions" when requesting data from a station that
didn't report. :-)

Barry