19990915: displaying fronts in McIDAS

>From: "Dan A. Dansereau" <address@hidden>
>Organization: Utah State University
>Keywords: 199909151552.JAA07318 McIDAS FRONT FRNTDISP

Dan,

Long time no hear!

>    1st - I'm lost again - could you send an example
>of where & how to decode the fronts, along
>with where to put them so that the MCGUI part
>of mcidas can display them.
>( warning this may be a loaded question - he ha )

You don't say which version of McIDAS you are talking about.
The answer to the question is different depending on whether or
not you are going to use ADDE access to the frontal data or not.
If not, then you would be using the FRONT command to display fronts
and it would need to be able to access ASUS1* and FSUS2* files
created by the ldm.  The LDM pqact.conf entries for these products
are:

# 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

(be mindful of the need for tabs between DDS and ^ and at the
beginning of the FILE line and after FILE!!).

Now, if you are talking about ADDE access to frontal data, then
this is done through XCD.  FRNTDISP will get the frontal data
from the dataset RTWXTEXT, so your session needs to have ADDE
datasets setup.  We need to touch base more after you can let me
know how setup your login really is.

>    2nd - I have been trying to get the IR8.BAT to function
>so that I can tweek it for some things we are trying to do here.

OK.  You want to setup ROUTE PostProcess BATCH processing.  This
is straightforward, but has a number of steps.  Let me advise you
that you should update your PP BATCH setup from IR8.BAT to GE-IR.BAT.
This will require that you take use the DROUTE.BAT file in the
current (and 7.5) McIDAS distribution and redo your routing table:

<login as 'mcidas' and start a McIDAS-X session>
<make sure that you are pointing to the copy of ROUTE.SYS that is
used/updated by the ldm-mcidas decoders:

DMAP ROUTE.SYS

If the copy you find in the listing is not the one in the ldm-mcidas
image decoder, lwtoa3, output data directory, update your REDIRECTion
to make it so.

Start using the new entries in DROUTE.BAT:

BATCH DROUTE.BAT

If you want compositing of images (compositing of GOES-East and GOES-West,
that is), then turn them on:

ROUTE REL C

If you want compositing of images with topography images, turn those on:

ROUTE REL N

>I assume that the DOS g8gifs.cmd only renames the gif files, is this
>correct?

I guess that I don't know what you are referring to.  Is this an OS/2
.CMD file that you grabbed of of our McIDAS demo machine (Don set those
things up)?

>where & how do you recomend running this batch file so that it will
>automatically
>do its thing EVERY time it gets a new image ? ( ie: ldm or mcidas etc )

The sequence is:

<login as the user running your LDM; this is typically 'ldm'>
o cd decoders          (whatever directory you have your ldm-mcidas decoders in)
o <edit the Bourne shell script batch.k and set the MCHOME (current batch.k)
  or MCDATA (older batch.k) environment variable to match your McIDAS
  installation>
o make sure that the ~ldm/decoders directory is in the PATH for 'ldm'
o make sure that you have NO McIDAS environment variables defined for
  your LDM sessions (i.e. take out any McIDAS environment variable definition
  from your shell configuration file like .cshrc, .profile, etc.)
o make sure that you do NOT have the ~mcidas/bin directory in 'ldm's
  PATH
o make sure that there is a copy of ROUTE.SYS in the directory in which
  lwtoa3 creates its output data files; ROUTE.SYS must be readable AND
  writable by 'ldm'
o make sure that there is a copy of SYSKEY.TAB in the directory in which
  lwtoa3 creates its output data files; SYSKEY.TAB must be readable
  and writable by 'ldm'

The sequence of events when an image is received by the LDM is:

o lwtoa3 decodes the image into the directory specified by its pqact.conf
  entry '-d' flag
o lwtoa3 reads ROUTE.SYS to see how the file is to be named and if
  a ROUTE PostProcess is to be run
o if there is a PostProcess to be run, lwtoa3 tries to run a program
  named batch.k
o by virtue of having put an executable Bourne shell script named batch.k
  in the ~ldm/decoders directory, and by making sure that it is this
  copy of batch.k that is found by lwtoa3 (through PATH), the script
  gets run.
o batch.k sets McIDAS environment stuff through MCDATA, MCPATH, etc.
  and then runs the real McIDAS command batch.k.  The real batch.k
  then runs the commands in the PostProcess BATCH file (e.g. GE-IR.BAT)
  and creates the thing you are after

>Thanks much for you help - I figure I'm up to a case of beer by now!

Super!

>so I'll get even in January when I'm back for the MM5 class

It will be good to see you again.

Please let me know if there is anything in the above that doesn't make
sense, or if you have any problems.

Tom Yoksas