McIDAS-XCD
Administrator Information
About
New NWS Radar Products
This page contains McIDAS-XCD administrator information
about new National Weather Service WSR-88D (Weather Surveillance Radar-1988
Doppler) and TDWR (Terminal Doppler Weather Radar) products available
on NOAAPORT. McIDAS-X users looking for information
about accessing the new products should go to the McIDAS-X
User Information page.
The Overview section
below contains information about the products and related announcements
from the National Weather Service. The Configuring Your McIDAS-XCD
Workstation section
below contains instructions for updating your McIDAS-XCD 2010.1
workstation to file the radar products and create
the corresponding ADDE datasets.
Overview
Since Feburary 2010, the National Weather Service has been distributing
new (previously unavailable) WSR-88D and TDWR radar products via the SBN (Satellite
Broadcast Network), RPCCDS (Radar
Product Central Collection Dissemination Service ) and NOAAPORT. Ten
of the new products are essentially higher resolution versions of
older NEXRAD products that have been available on NOAAPORT (and in
McIDAS) since January 2001. Seven of the ten older products are scheduled
to be sunset (no longer diseminated) on 12 January 2011; the other
three will be retained until Feburary 2012.
The initial announcement of the new WSR-88D products and those being
replaced are in NWS
TIN09-41. A more detailed listing of both the WSR-88D and TDWR
products is in the NWS
Radar Products page. Finally, the revised sunset dates for
the lower-resolution products is in NWS
TIN09-41, 28 Sep 2010 Amendment. Note that the amendment indicates
that seven of the ten low-res products (with WMO headers N1R, N2R,
N3R, N0W, N1V, N2V, N3V) will be sunset on 12 Jan 2011, and due to customer
feedback the other three low-res products (N0R, N0Z, N0V) will
be retained until February 2012.
The McIDAS updates to support the 41 new WSR-88D and TDWR products
include new datasets in the new McIDAS-XCD release (version 2010.1,
Dec 2010), as well as McIDAS-X 2010.2 (Dec 2010) updates to the
radar servers, new image enhancements (for the EU command), and IMGDISP.CORE
additions that make it easy to display the new datasets with the appropriate
enhancement, maps and color bar.
Configuring Your McIDAS-XCD Workstation
As noted above, there are 41 new, higher-resolution, radar products
(26 WSR-88D products and 15 TDWR products) that have been available
since February 2010 via the SBN, RPCCDS and NOAAPORT. There are also
16 older, lower-resolution, radar products that have been available
on NOAAPORT (and McIDAS-XCD via the NEXRAD Decoder) since January 2001,
ten of which are scheduled to be sunset (no longer diseminated) because
of higher-resolution equivalents in the new product set.
Beginning with this McIDAS-XCD 2010.1 Fastrack release, McIDAS-XCD
administrators can make the 41 new products are available to users
by completing the numbered instructions below (to file the products
and create the corresponding ADDE datasets). The 2010.1 release also
contains options to keep the 16 older products for the time
being (until they are sunset), or remove them. Unless
your users have never used the older products, we recommend that you
keep them until your users have migrated to the new products.
If you use the default dataset names that are defined via new BATCH
files in this 2010.1 release, users can access the new data by three
different dataset groups: group TDWR for the TDWR
data (15 datasets, e.g., TDWR/BREF1), group WSR for
the WSR-88D data (26 datasets, e.g., WSR/BVEL3), and group RADAR for
both the TDWR and WSR-88D data (41 datasets, e.g., RADAR/TDWR-BREF1
and RADAR/WSR-BVEL3). Although it is essentially a duplicate of the
TDWR and WSR groups, the RADAR group was created because its name is
easy to remember and makes it simple for a user to check what radar
data is available on the server (by running the command DSINFO
I RADAR). As always, these are the default dataset names; you have
the option of defining other dataset names and choosing which ones
to publicize to your users.
If you are installing McIDAS-XCD for the first time on the workstation,
go to the McIDAS-XCD Administrator's Guide's Installing
McIDAS-XCD 2010.1 for the First Time and complete its instructions
rather than those below. (The first-time instructions include
the radar data configuration among its many initial configuration procedures.)
If you are configuring the radar data as part of your McIDAS-XCD 2010.1
installation process (i.e., you were directed to this page from step
7 of these instructions), or after
installing McDAS-XCD 2010.1, continue with the instructions below
to choose the locations to file the new radar products, create ADDE
dataset names for the new products, and choose whether to retain the
old products (in the NEXRAD/* datasets).
Note: These instructions are an abbreviated version
of those in the
Configuring the
Default ADDE Datasets page in the McIDAS-XCD
Administrator's Guide. See it for additional details, including
notes about the last command below (BATCH XCDADDE.BAT) and a for full
listing of the default ADDE dataset names.
- As user oper, run the script below from
the ~oper/mcidas directory to make a backup copy of the
~oper/mcidas/data/NEXRID.CFG file then replace it with a new version of
the file. The new version contains two new variables, named WSRFILE=
and TDWRFILE=, that replace the DIRFILE= variable (which is no longer used).
Type: sh ./xcd2010.1.sh
install radar
The backup copy of the file is named NEXRID.CFG_yyyymmdd (where yyyymmdd is
the current date, e.g., 20101223).
- As user oper, compare the previous and
new versions of file NEXRID.CFG (e.g., diff NEXRID.CFG_20101223 NEXRID.CFG)
then edit NEXRID.CFG and re-add your local changes and set the values for
variables WSRFILE= and TDWRFILE= to be the fully expanded paths to the directories
that will store the WSR-88D and TDWR data, respectively. Note that the directories
that you specify must already exist (if necessary,
use the mkdir command
to create them).
- As user mcadde, run the commands below
from a McIDAS-X session to create McIDAS strings named WSRDATA and TDWRDATA
that contain the fully expanded paths to the directories that will store
the WSR-88D and TDWR data, respectively. These are the same directories that
you specified for the values of WSRFILE= and TDWRFILE= in step 2 above.
Type: TE WSRDATA "/wsr_data_directory_path
Type: TE TDWRDATA "/tdwr_data_directory_path
Example: TE WSRDATA "/home/oper/xcd_data/wsr
Example: TE TDWRDATA "/home/oper/xcd_data/tdwr
- As user mcadde, run the command below
from a McIDAS-X session to
create the real-time ADDE datasets listed in the tables below. Running this
batch file (XCDADDE.BAT) creates all of the default datasets for the existing
groups RTGRIDS, RTGRIB2, RTPTSRC, RTWXTEXT, plus those in new groups RADAR,
TDWR and WSR. It will therefore overwrite any locally-created datasets with
names matching those in the batch file. Thus, we recommend that you make
a backup copy of the file ~mcadde/mcidas/data/RESOLV.SRV before
running the command below.
After completing this step you have datasets for both the new
radar data (in RADAR/*, TDWR/* and WSR/*) as well as the old radar data
(in NEXRAD/*). Complete the next step to either retain the NEXRAD/* datasets
or to discard them.
- Decide whether you will keep the old NEXRAD/* datasets
available for the time
being (until they are sunset), or remove them now. Unless
your users have never used the older products, we recommend that you
keep them until your users have migrated to the new products. At that
time (or after the products are sunset), you can remove the old datasets.
If you want to keep the old NEXRAD/* datasets available:
As user mcadde, run the command below from a McIDAS-X session
to remake the datasets so they will find the products in their new location
(which was defined in the WSRDATA string set in step 3 above).
If you want to remove the old NEXRAD/* datasets now:
As user mcadde, run the command below from a McIDAS-X session
to delete the datasets.
Type: BATCH RMNEXRADDE.BAT
This concludes the instructions for configuring your McIDAS-XCD 2010.1 workstation
to file the radar products and create the corresponding ADDE
datasets. If you completed these instructions as part of
the McIDAS-XCD 2010.1 installation procedure, return to McIDAS-XCD
Fastrack Version 2010.1 Software and Instructions page and proceed
to step 8.
Once you've installed McIDAS-XCD 2010.1 (including the instructions
above) and verified that the new
radar products are available in the RADAR/*, TDWR/* and WSR/* datasets,
we recommend that you notify your users about the availability of the
new data, and direct them to the McIDAS-X
User Information page
for information about accessing and using the new products. If you
decided to retain the old NEXRAD/* datasets (in step 5 above), you
can also use the same notice to tell the users about the need to migrate
from the old NEXRAD/* datasets to the new datasets
(RADAR/*, TDWR/* and WSR/*), as well as your planned
schedule for removing the NEXRAD/* datasets.
