Unidata McIDAS-X v2006
August 4, 2006
Unidata McIDAS-X Version 2006 is now available for download.
Unidata McIDAS-X v2006 is a combination of SSEC McIDAS-X v2006 and
XCD v2006 including additional bugfixes developed by the UPC, and
various applications and enhancements from the UPC, the Australian
Bureau of Meteorology, CSU/CIRA, and others.
New/Changed in McIDAS-X:
- A new command, IMGRBG was added to McIDAS-X. IMGRGB
combines images and basemaps into a multi-banded RGB image.
- WWDISP was modified to correctly plot severe thunderstorm
and tornado watch boxes. WWDISP in versions prior to 2006
will not plot the boxes because of a February 2006 change to the
National Weather Service product headers.
- GRDLIST output was modified because another space was required
in the LEVEL field. To accommodate the extra space there while keeping
the overall output width to 80 characters or less, the DAY, TIME and
SRC fields were moved one space to the right, and the FHOUR field was
reduced by one character.
- The Undiata graphical user interface to McIDAS, MCGUI will
be undergoing a series of changes. Please see the note
below regarding the first significant change to MCGUI in
v2006.
- Unidata supports McIDAS-X on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of
Fedora Core 4 and 5 Linux.
- Due to a change in the Windows XP service installation, the ADDE
remote server installation script (e.g., mcinet2005.sh) no longer
works on XP workstations with Service Pack 2 (SP2) or later.
Therefore, there is no remote server installation script
for McIDAS-X for XP v2006.
- The process for configuring the mcidas account was streamlined
in v2005. The following is a reminder those changes:
- environment definition files for conforming
(e.g., sh, bash, etc.) and non-conforming
(e.g., csh, tcsh, etc.) shells have been
updated to specify all environment variables needed to
build the distribution.
- scripts, mcxconfig and xcdconfig, have
been developed to lead the user through the process of
defining file REDIRECTions, setting up ADDE dataset
definitions, pointing (DATALOC) to remote
ADDE servers, etc.
Please review
Preparing the mcidas Account for details.
McIDAS-X v2006 Notes
- A major change for the Unidata v2006 MCGUI is the
reformulation of the image display definition file
ADDEIMAGE.CORE. In an effort to make
ADDEIMAGE.CORE (and ADDEIMAGE.SITE and
ADDEIMAGE.USER) entries easier to create/modify, the
format of the file has been completely changed. v2005 versions
of ADDEIMAGE.(CORE|SITE|USER) are incompatible with
MCGUI v2006. If you created any of these files, you need
to move them out of your MCPATH directories before
attempting to run MCGUI v2006.
- The McIDAS Learning Guide and
McIDAS Training Workshop materials
are currently the same as for v2005. These materials will
be updated before the
Fall McIDAS training workshop.
- Even though the McIDAS-X image window displays in recent Linux KDE
environments, it has been observed that there is a memory leak that
will render the workstation unresponsive if McIDAS is left running
for several days . For this reason, we do not support the use of
the KDE environment.
McIDAS-XCD v2006 Notes
- SSEC recommends that McIDAS-XCD be run on 32-bit versions
of Linux. Experience at the UPC has shown that there may be a
problem running -XCD on 64-bit versions of Linux (we run Fedora
Core 5). The problems we are seeing are decoders stop writing
output data files (both MDXX and GRID) after a certain period of
time, typically a few days. This issue is under investigation,
and a bugfix addendum will be released if/when a problem is
found and fixed.
- A GRIB ADDE server is now available in v2006. One may continue
to serve McIDAS GRID files as always, but may want to switch
to the new GRIB server for faster data transfers and less disk
space usage. The real-time GRIB server utilizes a MySQL
database. Only GRIB files from the NOAAPORT data stream have
been tested and are fully supported.
Useful McIDAS-X v2006 Materials
Please send all questions/comments to
Unidata McIDAS Support
<support-mcidas@unidata.ucar.edu>.
Tom Yoksas
Unidata User Support
