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Hi Kwan, re: > Your assessment of the problem was right on. I tried substituting - > 9999 for -9999.00 in the data, and TXT2MD could finally assign it as > missing. Very good. I'm glad happy to learn that I have not totally lost my mind yet :-) > One last question I have is: Can McIDAS plot weather characters such > as SW-, RA as weather symbols given the WX1 column of the data I sent > to you? For the key WXS McIDAS typically expects two parameters, WX1 and WX2. This is defined in the configuration file SFCPLOT.CORE and can be overwritten/redefined in a SFCPLOT.USER file in the same way that I talked about for SFCCON.USER previously. Two items that will likely prevent you from plotting weather symbols from the data you are including in your MD file: - your schema, KSFC, defined a scaling factor for the WX1 parameter: WX1 0 CHAR "WEATHER CODE A parameter represented as CHAR should have no scaling factor - the values you are storing are not what McIDAS is expecting. The McIDAS decoder converts the numeric indicator for weather into textual representation. To get an idea of what should be there, take a look at the real time data being decoded by McIDAS-XCD and available via ADDE: dataloc.k ADD RTPTSRC idd.unl.edu ptlist.k RTPTSRC/SFCHOURLY PAR=ID DAY TIME T TD WX1 WX2 NUM=100 If need be, use PTCOPY to copy over data from a dataset served remotely via ADDE so you can take a hard look at the data that is actually in the file using both PTLIST and the low level utility LWU (LWU LIST; check the online help for LWU). I am heading for Boulder in about a half hour to catch a bus for the airport and then I am on my way to Brazil. I will be out of touch for about two days once the trip begins... Cheers, Tom **************************************************************************** Unidata User Support UCAR Unidata Program (303) 497-8642 P.O. Box 3000 address@hidden Boulder, CO 80307 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unidata HomePage http://www.unidata.ucar.edu **************************************************************************** Ticket Details =================== Ticket ID: YAF-607526 Department: Support McIDAS Priority: Normal Status: Closed