The Weather Forecasting Forum

Does anybody know if a new station with the call letters MCW started reporting lately? Whatever this site is it is messing with the data from KMCW (Mason City IA), which seems to be OK.

This just started happening within the past week or two.

I don't know where MCW is located BUT by placing KMCW in the digatmos.pri should ensure that KMCW plots (when reporting) instead of MCW. This solution worked for me.

--Al Pietrycha

Thanks Al,

But the procedure you suggest will still allow the observation to be included in the analysis...the observation isn't plotted but it is still analyzed by DAWS. Try a smaller scale analysis centered on KMCW and you'll see what I'm referring to. About the only option I can think of to correct this is to remove every trace of MCW from the stn file, which shouldn't be necessary. Either that or hand analysis.

Pat

If you remove every trace of MCW, you'll lose the full KMCW plot, too.
One quick and dirty way to get it "out" is to use the "quality control panel" and choose "delete report" when you see the 3-letter report. Now, it doesn't plot and won't be analyzed either. (Be sure to "accept entry" for the 4-letter version(s) - KMCW)
Of course, then you have to "remove last product" and then "overlay plots" again - assuming that was your last step to that point.
If you use the .pri suggestion above, then you don't even have to replot, just redo your anaysis (if you've already done one).
Unfortunately, that means one extra step every time you do a chart there, but it's better than going into the downloaded data file and deleting that report.
Perhaps Tim can add an "ingest only 4-letter stations" option - for there are a number of those three letter devils in there that could mess up good plottings.

Pat,

As I’m not sure what properties you are trying to pleth, so I played around with DAWS2000 (still Tim’s best work, IMHO) and DA workstation. I created a plot centered over KMCW with a 300 mile scale. I was able to ‘see’ your problem after plething various sfc thermo fields (temp, dew, etc.) w/ either the Barnes or Cressman smoothing functions. I was able to overcome the problem between KMCW vs. MCW AND this fix worked for KXVG up in MN (a previous thread). If you edit the digatm.rul file, the analysis should ignore MCW. What I did was to add the following...

STATN DATA ACTION AMOUNT
------------------------------------
MCW TEMP DELETE
MCW DWPT DELETE
MCW WIND DELETE

This worked on both versions of DA. Try this and give a shout back as to your results.

--Al

Al,

Thanks for this, looks to be working extremely well! I was hoping you would be able to duplicate the analyses problems; keeps me from looking like an idiot:)

Incidentally, since you brought up DA2000 (I like it better than DAWS because it is a great deal faster), have you had any troubles changing isopleths to a dot or dash? On my system it seems whatever one enters into the styles column under the contours tab the end result is always a solid line. This wasn't always the case...perhaps some file may have been corrupted on my machine??? Any ideas?

Anyway, thanks again for your help with the station problems!!!

Pat