Critical Update For PCGRIDDS32/WINGRIDDS WAFS GRIB Ingestor

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jkrob
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Critical Update For PCGRIDDS32/WINGRIDDS WAFS GRIB Ingestor

Post by jkrob »

All WAFS GRIB Users,

This is to inform you there is a new release of the GRIB2PCG32 WAFS GRIB ingestor to fix a critical bug. This applies to all PCGRIDDS32, Operational WINGRIDDS and the new Beta WINGRIDDS users and seems to only apply to GRIB2 WAFS files (which will soon be the standard).

This bug seems to have started recently and I believe it is associated with how NCEP is building it's GRIB2 WAFS GRIB files. The grid area for each octant is 73x73 grid points (5329 total grid points-bytes) per parameter. However, there are some GRIB messages which have fewer than 1000 bytes in size and is causing the GRIB unpacking routines in GRIB2PCG32 (written & supplied by NCEP) to crash. Even with the GRIB2 JPEG compression, the GRIB messages should not be that small. To convince NCEP they may have a problem with their data processing is like trying to steer a supertanker ship with a 2x4 board. So...until that time, the GRIB2PCG32 ingest utility has been limited to processing GRIB messages greater than 1000 bytes and rejecting any messages less than that size. This seems to work correctly under test.

I hope this has not caused anyone any problems & thanks for your support,
Jeff Krob
PCGRIDDS32/WINGRIDDS System Developer
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