20040206: TAF's in McIDAS

>From:  "Rob Gillies ." <address@hidden>
>Organization:  Utah State
>Keywords:  200402070046.i170k7p1022599 McIDAS TAFRPT

Hi Rob,

It has been a long time since we talked.  How are you?  By the
way, it strikes me that I have owed you an email for sometime
with the results of our investigation of whether or not it is
possible to have a proxy server for ADDE datasets.  I have
been chatting with a system administrator at DRI who worked
long and hard to get this to work at their site, but to no avail.
Since he is still experimenting with this, I will not call
the case shut just yet, but it does not look good.

>how might one go about listing a TAF (e.g. in same fashion as a METAR) in 
>Mcidas? Do you have a simple script?

McIDAS has a TAF report listing routine named TAFRPT.  TAFRPT accesses
the RTWXTEXT dataset from ADDE servers and can list back TAFs for stations
or states.  Here is the online help for how to run TAFRPT:

TAFRPT -- Lists terminal aerodrome forecasts
   TAFRPT id1..idn  nfcst <keywords>
Parameters:
   id1..idn | station IDs or states (use P.O. abbreviations) to list
   nfcst | number of forecasts to list (def=1)
Keywords:
   CO=co1..con | lists observations for all stations in these countries;
                 use CCODE command to list valid country codes
   DATASET= | ADDE dataset name; specify as group/descriptor or alias
              (def=RTWXTEXT/TERMFCST)
   TYPE= | type of forecast to list; valid entries are LONG, SHORT or
           ALL (def=LONG)
Remarks:
   You must specify at least one station ID, state or country.

If McIDAS-XCD decoding routines are running correctly on your
server, then you should be able to "point" to it (DATALOC ADD)
and access the TAFs.  If this does not work from your
own ADDE server, you should try one of the other cooperating
community servers (e.g., adde.ucar.edu, papagayo.unl.edu,
cacimbo.ggy.uga.edu, etc.)

Here is an example:

DATALOC ADD RTWXTEXT allegan.ser.usu.edu   (may be a different machine)
TAFRPT UT

Please let me know if TAFRPT was the kind of application you
were looking for.

>Thanks ... Rob

Cheers,

Tom

>From address@hidden Tue Feb 10 09:31:01 2004

Dear Tom:

yes ! that's just what I needed.

Has been a long time - tempus fugit when you are not looking. We have a new 
sysadmin here and he is also looking in to see what he can do ... maybe we will 
just have to ingest the data ... we shall see.

Life here very busy and developments ensue with Dan and the Climate database - 
no doubt he contacts once in a while?

Anyway, have to rush .. thanks again ... Rob

***************************
Robert R. Gillies
Associate Professor
Utah State University
Plants, Soils and Biometeorology
Aquatic, Watershed and Earth Resources
4820 Old Main Hill
Logan, UT 84322-4280
Phone: 435-797-2664
Email: address@hidden
***************************