Satellite Imagery and CMC Data

[Robert Mullenax]

GEMPAK can use McIDAS AREA format or GINI format.  The best place to get
free imagery from for use in GEMPAK (assuming you don't have NOAAport
and don't have McIDAS and can't use the McIDAS ADDE server) is from NCEP
via FTP at:

ftpprd.ncep.noaa.gov

cd to

/pub/data/nccf/images/satellite/

and you will see GOES-E and GOES-W with all sorts of subdirectories. 
These images are in McIDAS AREA format.

As far as the CMC data, we do the same thing here.  It's quite easy to
put into GEMPAK.  Here is my retrieval script.  We signed an agreement
(free by the way) with CMC to get the highres data out to 72 hours so I
just get the public lores data for 78 and greater.  Just source your
Gemenviron, cat the raw grib files and pipe them to dcgrib2.

#!/bin/csh
cd /usr/tmp
mkdir $$
cd /usr/tmp/$$
set HR=$1
source ~gempak/GEMPAK/Gemenviron 
set date=`date +%Y%m%d`
wget -nd -r -l1 -A '*CMC*P078*'
http://dd.weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/grib/public/lores/CMC_glb_${HR}/
cat CMC*P078* | dcgrib2 -m 99999
/data/ldm/gempak/model/cmc/${date}${HR}_cmcglobex.gem
wget -nd -r -l1 -A '*CMC*P08*'
http://dd.weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/grib/public/lores/CMC_glb_${HR}/
cat CMC*P08* | dcgrib2 -m 99999
/data/ldm/gempak/model/cmc/${date}${HR}_cmcglobex.gem
wget -nd -r -l1 -A '*CMC*P09*'
http://dd.weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/grib/public/lores/CMC_glb_${HR}/
cat CMC*P09* | dcgrib2 -m 99999
/data/ldm/gempak/model/cmc/${date}${HR}_cmcglobex.gem
wget -nd -r -l1 -A '*CMC*P1*'
http://dd.weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/grib/public/lores/CMC_glb_${HR}/
cat CMC*P1* | dcgrib2 -m 99999
/data/ldm/gempak/model/cmc/${date}${HR}_cmcglobex.gem
cd /usr/tmp
rm -rf $$


Hope this helps.

Robert Mullenax
CSBF Meteorology


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-gembud at unidata.ucar.edu on behalf of Chris Lander
Sent: Tue 2/13/2007 2:37 PM
To: Gembud
Subject: Satellite Imagery and CMC Data

I have two question (keep in mind that I am still trying to learn this 
program):

1st Question
My office has been downloading satellite images in tiff format from 
http://goes.gsfc.nasa.gov/goeseast/.  I tried load these images into 
GEMPAK, however, I get the following error message (which repeats itself

6 times):

/070213/1651[IM -3] Image file $SAT/ir/IR4_20070213_1645 not a supported

format/

I therefore assumed that tiff images were not supported, so I converted 
the image to jpg and gif.  Neither of them worked either.  So...  my 
question is, what image type does GEMPAK support, and where can I 
download them from.

2nd Question

We are downloading 525 Canadian Regional hiRes grib files from cmc twice

per day.  How do I get these grib files into a format that can be read 
by GEMPAK.  I will also be looking to convert GFS and NAM grib data in a

gempak format later as well, but I don't want to get to far ahead of 
myself just yet :)

Thanks in advance
Christopher Lander