McIDAS-X Fastrack Version 2015.2
Significant Modifications

This page contains significant software modifications included in McIDAS-X version 2015.2. The list includes the changes that we think are of greatest interest to sites, so is somewhat subjective. See the Fastrack 2015.2 Software Changes to see the list of all changes included in the release.

1. Changed support of McIDAS-X on Apple, Red Hat and Sun/Oracle systems as follows:
• On Apple Mac OS X systems, changed support from 10.7 and 10.8 to 10.8, 10.9 and 10.10.
• On Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems, changed support from 5.2 PPC, 5.7 Intel and 6.1 Intel
  to 5.11 Intel and 6.7 Intel.
• No longer support McIDAS-X on Solaris 10 OS x86 systems. Support on Solaris 10 OS SPARC systems continues, but only for builds with gcc/gfortran compilers.
See the McIDAS-X 2015.2 Supported System Configurations page for the list of all supported configurations.
2. Added preliminary release versions of INSAT-3D servers to allow creation of INSAT-3D datasets. These are not the final release; most of the remaining issues are calibration-related and we are waiting for further calibration updates from the data provider. The three servers are INDI, which uses calibration lookup tables; INST, which uses coefficients found in the data stream; and INDS, which is for sounder data.
3. Updated Himawari servers to accommodate missing segments, remove duplicate information when listing Japan sector images, work correctly with large negative MAG= values, produce the correct output size when MAG= is used with SIZE=SAME, and write correct value for Words 46 and 47 of Area files created with IMGCOPY.
4. Added Kalpana Level 1b HDF5 and native format MSG Level 1.5 servers to allow creation of their datasets on local and remote servers, and display or manipulation of the data using the IMG* commands. See the DSSERVE command documentation in the McIDAS User's Guide or its online help for information about creating the datasets.
5. Updated NEXRAD Level III server to support images with product codes 180 (256-level base reflectivity), 183 (16-level base velocity), 185 (8-level base spectrum width), and 187 (16-level long range base reflectivity).
6. Updated image archive servers to remove restriction that limited users to accessing only one day of data at a time. Also updated the IMGREMAP command to allow use of both the DAY= keyword and a positive position number when requesting data from an image archive server.
   
   Note for sites that serve MSG (Meteosat Second Generation) data:
   If a user running 2015.2 or later runs an IMGREMAP command with both the DAY= keyword and a negative (relative) position number requesting MSG data from a remote server running a version earlier than 2015.2, the server will return the requested day's most recent image rather than the requested image. If the remote server is running 2015.2 or later the correct image is returned. Therefore we recommend that sites with remote servers of MSG data update those servers to McIDAS-X 2015.2 before or at the same time as their clients in order to avoid this compatibility issue.
7. Added new IMGPARM command, which is used to create a multi-band image of parameters useful for creating composites. The command was formerly in the McIDAS-XRD package but is now in McIDAS-X. See the IMGPARM command documentation in the McIDAS User's Guide or its online help for details.
8. Changed the output for the D and IMGPROBE LIST POINT commands to remove the space following the latitude value. This change moved the longitude value and preceding slash (/) one space to the left to accommodate large image line numbers (which in previous versions could run into the end of the longitude value). If you use the D or IMGPROBE LIST POINT command and have scripts that parse the longitude value or the preceding slash (/) from the output you will need to modify the scripts to accommodate their new location in the output.
9. Updated sounding calculations to use 300 MB rather than 500 MB for the top pressure level in the HODO, UALIST and UAPLOT command precipitable water calculation and corrected equations for level of free convection, virtual temperature and equilibrium level.
10. Increased the value of MAXGRIDPT from 8,000,000 to 10,000,000 in gridparm.inc and mcidas.h and added call to setrlimit in grib2func.c so the GRD* commands (GRDCOPY, GRDDISP, etc.) on all platforms but Windows 7 now work with grids containing up to 10 million points.
11. Updated GRDCOPY, GRDDISP, GRDIMG, GRDINFO and GRDLIST commands to have the LEV= keyword match on both MB and HPA for units of pressure, regardless of which is specified. If units are specified in LEV=, the output units (e.g., in GRDLIST's listing, GRDDISP's plot/contour label, and GRDCOPY's output grid) will be those specified rather than the native units. Also, a new keyword, PUNIT=, was added to let you specify the preferred output pressure units (MB or HPA) for all levels so that if multiple levels are required you don't have to list all of them in the LEV= keyword.
12. Updated CONTOUR.DEF file with default contour interval of 400 for surface pressure and mean sea level pressure grids with units of PA (Pascals). This change was added because some real-time NOAAPORT grids now have units of PA rather than HPA (or MB). If you have scripts with GRDDISP commands that include the CINT= keyword you will likely need to change its value (e.g., from CINT=4 to CINT=400) to accommodate the scaling factor difference between PA and HPA units.
13. Updated the PLOT option in the SFCPLOT command to plot the cloud coverage symbol for the maximum cloud amount (CLR, FEW, SCT, BKN or OVC) reported in the ISFC-schema MD files cloud coverage keys (CIGC, CC1 and CC2). Users can also choose/display the previous version of the PLOT option (with a "+" at the center and, if a ceiling is reported, the number "2" or "3" from the CIGC key plotted to the right in cyan) by specifying SFCPLOT PLOT.OLD .
14. Added ability to define the location of the .mctmp directories by using the MCTMPDIR environment variable. See the Starting McIDAS-X section of the McIDAS User's Guide for details.
15. Updated the USCOUNTY.MAP, USSTATE.MAP and USZONE.MAP files to match the most recent corresponding AWIPS Map Database Catalog files. These are the files that are used by the MAP command's STATE=, MARINE=, COUNTY= and ZONE= keywords.
16. Updated the station database (file STNDB.CORE) to include eight new TAF stations (KIXD, KPVW, KROG, KLVK, KSGJ, KIFP, PAKW, KGBD) and more than 200 new GFSMOS and NAMMOS stations. Also added corrections for stations SRX, N88, DIX and KSTZ.
17. Updated the McIDAS-XRD package (which is included in the McIDAS-X installation files) to include three new commands (IMGCHECK, SATCOMP and WXSYMB) and one new data file (MCAWIPS.CORE). Also improved the performance of the A, AA and AAA servers (maadir, maaadir and maaaadir) and fixed the TIRCHK command to correctly label time output on little-endian machines. See the Files Included in McIDAS-XRD 2015.2 page for the complete list of commands, servers and data files included in the package.

Return to the installation instructions: Unix | Windows 7