20010411: Profiler plotting failures (cont.)

>From: "Paul L. Sirvatka" <address@hidden>
>Organization: College of DuPage
>Keywords: 200104102320.f3ANKPL28016 McIDAS-X PROFSECT

Paul,

This is a follow-up to our earlier exchanges regarding 6-minute profiler
cross section plotting.

re: you have an alias for RTPTSRC/PROF6MIN called 6MIN
>Yes that is correct. 

re: I need to check out PROFSECT's failure further
>Please do...If I specify the exact time when data is there it seems to
>work. I believe that sometimes the latest data is not on a six minute
>interval...if that helps.

OK, here is the story (and fix).  The concept of 'LATEST' time was
introduced before the move to ADDE.  Specifying LATEST as a time
actually meant "go look in the system key table to see what was the
last time ingested for the particular data".  With ADDE, one may be
pointing to a data server that is not local, so one would not
necessarily have access to a copy of the system key table (SYSKEY.TAB)
that was being updated by a decoder).  Given this, the concept of
'LATEST' needed to be modified a bit.

What I have done is modify PROFSECT to calculate an appropriate default
time for both hourly-summary and 6-minute data.  The appropriate times
are:

hourly summary:
  use the current hour (and day) if it is 25 minutes past the hour else
  the previous hour (and day) if it is before 25 past

6-minute:
  use the previous 6-minute time (and day) 

Examples:

Clock Time      Default time  Default day    Data type
---------------+-------------+--------------+------------------
13:20:08        12:00:00      today          hourly summary
15:26:15        15:00:00      today          hourly summary
00:08:32        23:00:00      yesterday      hourly summary

13:20:08        13:12:00      today          6-minute
15:26:15        15:18:00      today          6-minute
00:08:32        00:00:00      today          6-minute
00:04:39        23:54:00      yesterday      6-minute

etc.
  
Of course, the user is not prevented from specify the exact time that
s/he wants.

A reworked version of the PROFSECT source, profsect.pgm, can be FTPed
from the pub/mcidas/src directory of anonymous FTP on our FTP server,
ftp.unidata.ucar.edu.

To build and install the new version, do the following:

<login as 'mcidas'>
cd mcidas7.7/src
mv profsect.pgm profsect.pgm.770
ftp ftp.unidata.ucar.edu
  <user> anonymous
  <pass> your_full_email_address
  cd pub/mcidas/src
  get profsect.pgm
  quit
touch profsect.pgm
make profsect.k
rm ~/bin/profsect.k
ln profsect.k ~/bin

Please verify that your profiler time-height cross section script works
correctly after this update.

Tom