19990303: Colgates McIDAS-X 7.40, NLDN, and ASUS

>From: Adam Burnett <address@hidden>
>Organization: Colgate
>Keywords: 199903032004.NAA04174 LDM IDD NLDN ASUS

Adam,

>Your suggestions yesterday did the trick.

Glad to hear it.

>Just 2 more quick questions.
>
>1. I remember you once telling me that it was possible for Colgate to get a
>feed on the lightning data.  What's the process?

You need to send a request for the feed to Dr. David Knight at SUNY Albany
(address@hidden) requesting a feed.  The NLDN data is fed by
point-to-point IDD transfer instead of the "normal" fan out feed for
FOS/NOAAport or Unidata-Wisconsin.  In your email, you should include
the full name of the machine that you want fed (i.e. the name of the
machine running your LDM) and its IP address.  I believe that Dave
has a boiler plate reply that spells out the terms under which a site
can receive the NLDN data.  If not, the basic principle is that the
data must NEVER show up on a web page that is viewable past your campus.

>2. I was trying to figure out how to obtain information on fronts from my
>ldm feed.  The pqact.conf example on the Unidata site shows and example for
>WXP:
>
># Fronts in yymmddhh_frt.wmo
>#DDS    ^ASUS01 .... ([0-3][0-9])([0-2][0-9])
>#       FILE    data/surface/front/(\1:yy)(\1:mm)\1\2_frt.wmo
>
>How does one do it for Mcidas?

The entry for McIDAS is:

# fronts in ASUS1ddd
DDS ^ASUS01 .... ([0-3][0-9])([0-2][0-9])
    FILE    data/surface/front/ASUS1%j

# forecast fronts in FSUS2ddd
DDS ^FSUS02 .... ([0-3][0-9])([0-2][0-9])
    FILE    data/surface/front/FSUS2%j

You will then need to make sure that you have a REDIRECTion that points to
ASUS and FSUS files in the appropriate directory.

I want to quickly add that you will be migrating to use of the newer
McIDAS ADDE commands in the near future (I can say this since a large
collection of non-ADDE routines will be sunset in the coming months),
so you will need to start familiarizing yourself (and any/all other user(s))
on how to use ADDE commands.  My recommendation is that you setup the
McIDAS ADDE remote server on your machine and have all access go through
that server.  The job of setting up REDIRECTions to point at data files
like fronts will be the responsibility of one and only one person, the
system administrator (which happens to be you).  The average user would
then simply have to add a DATALOC entry that says to ask your remote
server for the front data (continuing with this example).  This would
look like:

DATALOC ADD RTWXTEXT gissun.colgate.edu

(assuming that the machine running the ADDE remote server is
gissun.colgate.edu).  More on these topics can be found in the online
McIDAS documentation that is accessible from the Unidata McIDAS-X
HomePage: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/mcidas/mcx.

>Thanks Again

Talk to you later...

Tom