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.
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.
-- -ZDRcal 1.5