Motif-IRAS Tape Utilities Menu

Before you start Motif-IRAS you should have at least one radar data volume accessible on disk. Since most radar data volumes are archived on tape, a special set of magnetic tape utilities have been developed for reading Universal Format and NEXRAD Level II tapes. These utilities are supplied with the Motif-IRAS archive and can be found in the ./motif-iras/main directory. The executable "IRAS" simply provides a graphical interface from which you can run Motif-IRAS and the magnetic tape support utilities. Each function can run concurrently. As many as two Motif-IRAS sessions can be run at one time (as long as no other applications are running which require private color maps). A sample IRAS control panel is presented below.

Sample IRAS Control Panel

The first button simply starts a Motif-IRAS session. The second button starts the magnetic tape utilities manager. A sample magnetic tape utilities menu is presented below.

Sample Magnetic Tape Utilities Menu

Magnetic Tape Utilities Menu

This button is used to define the device name for the magnetic tape unit. When selected a form is displayed from which you can enter the device name. In most cases you will want to include the no rewind option with the device name.

This button is used to position the magnetic tape to the beginning.

This button can be used to skip a finite number of files in the forward direction. Using this option can save considerable time when extracting files towards the end of the tape (as long as you have an idea how many files you want to skip before the file(s) to be extracted).

This button is used to catalog the contents of a tape containing Universal Format or NEXRAD Level II data. The date and start time for each radar volume on the tape is displayed along with its file position in the tape.

This button is used to extract a user specified time sequence of radar volumes from Universal Format or NEXRAD Level II tapes. When selected, a form is displayed in which you can define a start and stop date and a start and stop time.

This button is used to copy a set of NEXRAD Level II radar volumes from disk to magnetic tape. Like NCDC format tapes, 13 packets are contained in one physical tape record. However, no header file is generated.

This button is used to destroy the magnetic tape utilities menu.

Any comments, suggestions, etc., should be sent to dave@thunder.ias.sdsmt.edu