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19990505: McIDAS-X Fkey menu thermodynamic diagram plotting (cont.)

>From: address@hidden
>Organization: St. Cloud State
>Keywords: 199904091934.NAA23884 McIDAS-X 7.50 Fkey menu 

Alan,

>My problems with plotting skewT's and stueve diagrams came
>when using the Fkey menu, selected under misc.  this gives
>the usual mcidas menu.  Tried this again, and  on 1st try,
>the plot came up, then imediately vanished.  Further attempts
>gave the same error as before, invalid time .....

This was helpful.  I have reproduced the error here at Unidata and
see the problem.  In the module 'raobstn.gui', I had not commented
out the conversion of time in HH to HH:MM:SS (through procedure
ordTime).  I just did so here and everything works as it should.
In my defense (hedge, hedge :-) the real problem is in UAPLOT and
HODO.  They _should_ take time in any McIDAS-valid time format.
In 7.5, they do not.  I will need to get on SSEC about this one.
In the mean time, I FTPed over the fixed 'raobstn.gui' to waldo, and
I will include it in an Addendum.

>I had not found the plot type  dropdown you described; when I 
>tried this, everything worked fine.  When I changed to the Fkey
>menu... see the paragraph above.

Right you are.  This is (once again) my fault.  Sorry for the problems.

>Also found the raw data files; great.  Also note the  .XCD files
>and see they are quite large.

The .XCD files contain ALL of the textual data for a single day.  In
the era of NOAAPORT, these files can be up to 200 MB!

>Any way to extract just a part of
>these, say just U.S. stations, or just the stations from a particular
>state?

You can use the new McIDAS ADDE routines to list out any data you want
from these files.  Given this, is there any real need to put the data
into separate files?

>I can do this on an individual station basis, the gui
>even provides a nice file saving utility, which I have used. 

You can do it by station, state, country, LATxLON region, etc.

>Just hate to save the whole world's data to get a limited region.

You don't have to.  The selection capabilities in the various RPT
applications (SFCRPT, RAOBRPT, FOUSRPT, TAFRPT, SYNRPT (all of which
are drivers from the very generic program OBSRPT), you can list
observations for pretty much anywhere you are interested in.

>Also, if I save an .XCD file, I assume there is a way to point to it
>again for viewing or analysis purposes with mcidas as it would be 
>subject to scour if left in the usual place.

I have never tried this.  I imagine that you can regenerate the pointer
files to the spool (i.e. *.XCD) and then list the data for the old data.
I will have to play with this a bit to figure out what is involved.

>I apologize for the questions on such a sad day.  No hurry with the
>answers.  

I have found that it is much better to keep busy.  Every time I stop
I get incredibly sad.

Tom