VSDB-Analysis Tool: Configure

The behavior of VSDB-Analysis is controlled by the contents of the configuration file or the job command passed to it on the command line. The default VSDB-Analysis configuration may be found in the METv1.1/data/config/VSDBAnalysisConfig_default file. The configuration used by the test script may be found in the METv1.1/scripts/config/VSDBAnalysisConfig file. Prior to modifying the configuration file, users are advised to make a copy of the default:

cp data/config/VSDBAnalysisConfig_default tutorial/config/VSDBAnalysisConfig_tutorial

Open up the tutorial/config/VSDBAnalysisConfig_tutorial file for editing with your preferred text editor.

For this tutorial, we'll set up a configuration file to run a few jobs. Then, we'll show an example of running a single analysis job on the command line.

The VSDB-Analysis configuration file has two main sections. The items in the first section are used to filter the VSDB data being processed. Only those lines which meet the filtering requirements specified are retained and passed down to the second section. The second section defines the analysis jobs to be performed on the filtered data. When defining analysis jobs, additional filtering parameters may be defined to further refine the VSDB data with which to perform that particular job.

As a word of caution, the VSDB-Analysis tool was designed to be extremely flexible. However, with that flexibility comes potential for improperly specifying your job requests, leading to unintended results. It is the user's responsibility to ensure that each analysis job is performed over the intended subset of VSDB data. The -dump_row job command option is useful for verifying that the analysis was performed over the intended subset of VSDB data.

Edit the tutorial/config/VSDBAnalysisConfig_tutorial file as follows:

• Set vx_mask[] = [ "G212" ]; to filter out only the lines for the G212 grid.
• Set line_type[] = [ "CTC>278.000" ]; to filter out only the CTC lines that have been thresholded >278.
• Set var[] = [ "TMP" ]; to filter out only the lines for the TMP variable.
• Set joblist[] = [
  "-job vsdb_job_filter -dump_row tutorial/out/vsdb_analysis/filter_job.vsdb",
  "-job vsdb_job_aggr -dump_row tutorial/out/vsdb_analysis/aggr_ctc_job_1.vsdb -level P850-750 -interp_pnts 1",
  "-job vsdb_job_aggr -dump_row tutorial/out/vsdb_analysis/aggr_ctc_job_25.vsdb -level P850-750 -interp_pnts 25"
  ];

The configuration file selections listed above achieve the following:

• Filter out only those VSDB lines which have "G212" for the masking region, "CTC>278.000" for the line type, and "TMP" for the variable name.
• Define the first job which simply dumps the filtered VSDB data to a file.
• Define the second job which sums contingency table count lines of data using the interpolation neighborhood of 1.
• Define the third job which does the same but using the interpolation neighbhorhood of size 25.

Note that all three jobs use the -dump_row job command option which dumps the lines of VSDB data used for this job to the specified file name. We'll look at these files to ensure that the jobs ran over the intended subsets of VSDB data.