PROGRAM dwl_to_obs

Overview

DWL to DART converter

These are Doppler Wind Lidar measurements which have previously been extracted from the incoming format and output in ascii format, one pair of wind component observations per line. This converter reads in the ascii file and outputs the data in DART observation sequence (obs_seq) format.

This is OSSE data from a satellite which is expected to be launched in 2015. Information on the satellite mission is here at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADM-Aeolus.

The workflow is:

  • read in the needed information about each observation - location, time, observation values, obs errors - from an ascii file

  • call a series of DART library routines to construct a derived type that contains all the information about a single observation

  • call another set of DART library routines to put it into a time-sorted series

  • repeat the last 2 steps until all observations are processed

  • finally, call a write subroutine that writes out the entire series to a file in a format that DART can read in

Data sources

Matic Savli at University of Ljubljana has programs which read the expected instrument formats, do the proper conversions, and write out ascii lines, one per wind observation.

Programs

The dwl_to_obs.f90 file is the source for the main converter program. There is a sample data file in the “data” directory. The converter reads each text line into a character buffer and then reads from that buffer to parse up the data items.

To compile and test, go into the work subdirectory and run the quickbuild.sh script to build the converter and a couple of general purpose utilities. advance_time helps with calendar and time computations, and the obs_sequence_tool manipulates DART observation files once they have been created.

The observation types are defined in DART/obs_def/obs_def_dwl_mod.f90. That filename must be added to the input.nml namelist file, to the &preprocess_nml namelist, the ‘input_files’ variable before compiling any program that uses these observation types. Multiple files can be listed. Then run quickbuild.sh again. It remakes the table of supported observation types before trying to recompile the source code.

An example script for converting batches of files is in the shell_scripts directory. It will need customization before being used.