20040517: AWS data

>From: Mark Seefeldt <address@hidden>
>Organization: University of Colorado
>Keywords: 200405172212.i4HMCptK015665 IDV Antarctic map

Hi Mark-

>Thank you for the solutions which you provided for me in regards to using 
>the OUTLANT map.  I was able to get the map successfully installed.

Glad to hear it.

>With my Windows installation I was not able to find the idv.rbi 
>template.  Instead of using that file I created the maps.xml file, using 
>your instructions, and then modified the file to accept the new map of 
>Antarctica.  The new map is then able to be displayed.  In my Linux 
>installation I was able to find the idv.rbi template.

Oops.  The only reason I can think that you don't have an idv.rbi
file is that you first installed the IDV using version 1.0.1 which
did not have that file.  It should be created when the 
.metapps/DefaultIdv directory is first created.  However, if you 
were running the 1.0.1 version, it was not created and when you 
moved up to the 1.1 release, the DefaultIdv directory already existed
so idv.rbi was not created.  This was a feature added in the 1.1 release.
On your Linux machine, you must have stared with a 1.1 release.  If this
is not the case, let me know.

In any case, thanks for pointing out this discrepancy.  We'll modify
the code to check for idv.rbi and if it doesn't exist, we'll create
one.

Also, based on the input from this issue, we've modified the code
to make it even easier to add custom maps in the next release.  If you
added the antarctic map using maps.xml, it should automatically show
up in the next version as well.

>I will add that the only differences between the OUTLANT map and the map of 
>Antarctica drawn by "World Country Outlines" (Countries.zip) are:
>1 - The OUTLANT map includes the ice shelves around Antarctica, meanwhile 
>the Countries.zip map does not.  I feel it is significant to include the 
>ice shelves.

Does it account for the breaking up of the ice shelves? ;-)  The
maps we include are just a sampling of the possible maps you can use
in the IDV.  The IDV will handle shapefile maps, McIDAS maps and
maps from the Zebra display system.  It does not (yet) handle GEMPAK
maps, but the framework would easily support this addition.  

We've tried to include the set of maps that most users would want to
see, yet we also need to be mindful of the size of the maps that we
distribute.  The bulk of the size of the auxdata.jar file in which
the maps reside is the map files themselves.  

So, instead of distributing all known maps, we're trying to make
the framework support easy customization by the user.  The next
release will go a long way toward this goal for including custom
maps.  

>2 - There is a stray line which extends to the southwest from the Ross Ice 
>Shelf, it appears to be a bad data point in the file.

I'll look into this when I get a chance.

Thanks for using the IDV and providing feedback.

Don Murray
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