convertcamra

Suppose you want to convert the CAMRa files 6000new.dat and 6000dop.dat into netCDF for someone who has not used radar data before. You want to make sure that the data are unfolded, calibrated, noise is subtracted properly and so on. The best way is to use the script convertcamra. It is found in the scripts directory, and is installed to /usr/local/bin (or other specified directory) with the other unix utilities. You may wish to customize it a little. To create files for the British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC), Fred Bloggs would normally do something like this:

convertcamra /data/6000new.dat /data/6000dop.dat --user "Fred Bloggs <f.bloggs@radar.com>" --original

This produces two tar.gz files, one containing the netCDF files and one containing the quicklooks. Suppose Fred wanted to check the quicklooks and the netCDF files before submitting the data to BADC, he would do:

convertcamra /data/6000new.dat /data/6000dop.dat --user "Fred Bloggs <f.bloggs@radar.com>" --original --no-clean

This would leave the netCDF and quicklook files around for him to check. Documentation for the data produced can be found at http://www.met.rdg.ac.uk/radar/doc/camra.html.

Usage

With no arguments, usage information is reported. Otherwise it is invoked as follows:

convertcamra XXXXnew.dat [XXXXdop.dat] [options]

By default, two tar.gz files are created, one containing the netCDF files and the other containing the quicklooks. Zipped with the netCDF files is a file XXXXsummary.txt (produced using makenewsum) which contains information about each scan. With the quicklooks comes an index.html file which can be read by a browser for quicker looking at the quicklooks.

Options

--raster-range X-Y

Process only rasters X to Y. The default is to process all rasters.

--no-quicklooks

Do not generate any quicklooks.

--no-tarbals

Do not zip up the netCDF and quicklook directories.

--no-clean

Do not remove directories after creating tar.gz files.

--merge

Add the files created to existing directories; do not delete or rename old directories.

--user user

Specify the name and email of the person who converted the data.

--original

Also produce a tar.gz file containing the original Chilbolton-format data.

--old-names

By default BADC-compliant file names are used. This option uses the older and somewhat shorter names.

--verbose

Report all the shell commands that are run by the script.

--

Pass all remaining arguments to chil2nc. Most commonly this would be used to override the Zdr calibration with something like:

-- -ZDRcal 1.5