The Weather Forecasting Forum

Hello everyboby,

I got around to looking into the problem I'm having with grib not downloading correctly with the Grib download utility and have found the following.

I've only looked at the GF1004.dat file. What I found is that the ftp address was not complete or has changed since the code was written.

Original
Code:
[url]ftp://ftp.ncep.noaa.gov/pub/data/nccf/com/prod/gfs.%1%2%3%4/gfs.t%4z.pgrb2f03[/url]


My "fix"

Code:
[url]ftp://ftp.ncep.noaa.gov/pub/data/nccf/com/gfs/prod/gfs.%1%2%3%4/gfs.t%4z.pgrb2f03[/url]


The difference being the gfs/ having been added between com/ and prod.

Not sure about all the other files but suspect that it will be the same issue with them (?).

Another issue I discovered that is causing problems with the grib downloads within WINGRIDDS has to do with a capital "Z".

Example from the NMB1124.DAT file:

[url]ftp://ftp.ncep.noaa.gov/pub/data/nccf/com/nam/prod/nam.%1%2%3/nam.t%4[/url]Z.awip3d03.tm00 nam.t%4Z.awip3d03.tm00

If you put a lower case z in between the 4 and . were it reads ....nam.t%4z it works just fine.

[url]ftp://ftp.ncep.noaa.gov/pub/data/nccf/com/nam/prod/nam.%1%2%3/nam.t%4z.awip3d03.tm00[/url] nam.t%4Z.awip3d03.tm00

Regards,

Kevin

Thanks Kevin,

I`m having problems with the majority of the grib downloads within the downloader tool. Either the datasets are empty, they won`t convert properly or nothing downloads at all.

Hopefully in time this can be fixed up, because it saves a lot of hard work for the user digging around for available datasets (we`re lazy!). That said, I imagine it`s quite a pain putting something together, owing to the fact the grib dataset naming is always changing etc.

Thanks!

I gave up on this last night becuase I got too frustrated, but let me make sure I'm doing this right. I went and opened the GF1004 (in GRIB-->USER folder) and made the change you suggested.

Last night most of the time the data would download pretty quick (but I think the things would be empty?). Ever since I made these changes the data is downloading EXTREMELY slowly. At this rate it is going to take about an hour to download the GF1004 data. Is there any way to speed this up? Also, when I went to ingest the data it took much much longer than before. I'm guessing that's becuase there is actual data to ingest now?

Thanks. I'm just a bit confused. In the past two minutes it has downloaded Hour 000 and 003.

Downloading the datasets can take a long time, some of them are huge at over 100mb. Maybe your connection to the ftp servers is a little slow? I know when I download grib from nomads it can be pretty slow, and I have a decent adsl connection at home.

I`ve never tried to ingest any dataset that is larger than 20mb, I get worried that it might crash (probably because of previous daws experience/problems!).

I was thinking of using Gridds in automatic mode to throw out a few winter type charts for my website (snow prob, ratio, thicknesses etc). Owing to the huge size of the datasets, I`ll have to look for much smaller ones or else my bandwidth at home will be really high!! Or by the time I`ve finished downloading and ingesting the 12z`s the 18z will be out :P

OK, now I'm really confused.

I tried downloading the ECMWF and it seemed to be going well, albeit a bit fast, and then I "decode" the "Regular GRIB" and there are a bunch of files in there but they look like ETA files and I can'ts eem to find the ECMWF. I'd be willing to try to download this information manually but I have no idea how. I'm just terribly confused and I can't seem to get one thing to download correctly. LOL.

Can someone tell me exactly what needs to be done to successfully download a decent-sized data set, even if it's by hand? I already downloaded URL2File but I'm not sure how to use it.

Thanks (Sorry for being so helpless, lol)

I don`t bother with the grib downloader in wingridds as it seems a bit hit and miss (more miss than anything).

Grib can be downloaded from here
ftp://ftpprd.ncep.noaa.gov/pub/data/nccf/com/

Just download a grib file into your nws folder, and then use the built in wingridds conversion (convert regular grib). It should place the forecast files into the griddata folder when ready for plotting/contouring etc.

Thanks for your help.

I've been trying to do that, and I ingest/process the data, but when I go to open the file the file name flashes at the top and then the program freezes up. I tried using Grib2 data. Does that not work?

I tried it with other data and it worked. Thanks so much!!!!

I tried doing the ECMWF data that way. I saved it in the folder and decoded it but as far as I know it's not in the new folder. I don't know why it didn't process the way it should have.