Table of Contents

• List of querydata handling tools
  • Most important ones
  • Less important ones
  • Qdtools tutorials
• List of data conversion tools
• List of shapefile handling tools
• Other tools
• Other Information
• How to call the command line tools from scripts

List of querydata handling tools

Most important ones:

• qdinfo for displaying basic information about the data
• qdstat for calculating statistics on data values
• qdpoint for displaying a timeseries for selected points
• qdarea for displaying timeseries for selected areas

Less important ones:

• qdcrop for extracting parts of querydata
• qdfilter for calculating new results from the data
• qdscript for executing SmartTools-macros used by SmartMet editor
• combineHistory for combining several querydata files with respect to time
• qdinterpolatearea for changing the projection of querydata
• qdcheck
• qddiff for analyzing differences between querydata
• qdmissing
• qdproject for performing projection calculations
• qdsounding for extracting soundings from querydata
• qdsplit for splitting a querydata into separate files
• qdinterpolatetime for interpolating querydata to another time resolution
• qdcombine for combining all querydata-files from some directory to one querydata-file
• qdview for showing data coverage as a map
• qdset for changing querydata meta information (i.e. parameter names)
• qdgridcalc to calculate grid size for given projection area
• qdsmoother to smoothen querydata to get nicer animations

Qdtools tutorials

• qdinfo tutorial
  The tutorial demonstrates how to investigate data coverage, containing parameters etc.
• qdpoint tutorial
  The tutorial demonstrates how to retrieve data to the point.
• qdarea tutorial
  The simple tutorial shows how to retrieve maximum wind and mean temperature from the lake Usmas ezers. First, the tutorial shows how to crop lake from larger shape file. Then the cropped shape is converted to SVG path, which is finally used by qdarea to retrieve data.
• qdscript tutorial
  The tutorial shows one example how to process querydata to a fictional sailing index data. The tutorial shows how to investigate investigate required information from querydata, how to create and run Smarttool-scripts from command line, how to crop certain parameters from querydata and how to change parameter names.

List of data conversion tools

• gribtoqd converts GRIB1 and GRIB2 files to querydata
• grib2toqd converts GRIB2-files to querydata (deprecated, please use gribtoqd instead)
• qdtogrib converts querydata-file to grib-file
• ashtoqd converts MetOffice CSV ash advisories to querydata.
• bufrtoqd converts BUFR observations to querydata.
• radartoqd converts radar data in OPERA BUFR form to querydata
• combinepgms2qd converts several RADAR formatted pgm files into single querydata
• csv2qd for generating querydata from ASCII data
• qd2csv converts querydata to csv
• flash2qd convert flash text files to querydata
• grib2tojpg draws jpeg-image from grib2-file
• h5toqd converts EUMETNET OPERA radar files to querydata
• laps2qd convert LAPS-data to querydata
• metar2qd find METAR message form data and converts it to querydata
• nctoqd converts CF-1.4 conforming NetCDF to querydata
• wrftoqd converts WRF NetCDF to querydata
• pgm2qd converts RADAR formatted pgm files into querydata
• qdversionchange
• synop2qd find SYNOP message from data and converts it to querydata
• temp2qd find TEMP sounding message from data and converts it to querydata

List of shapefile handling tools

For handling shapefiles, two external programs are very handy:

• QGis desktop tool for showing and modifying shapes
• ogr2ogr to change shape projections

Smartmet tools:

• shape2ps for generating an image out of shapefiles
• shapefilter for extracting parts of a shapefile
• shape2svg for creating textgen region paths
• shape2xml for browsing shape data

Other tools

• cleaner for removing aged files from the system
• compositealpha for adding transparency to a plain RGB image

Other information

• Projection descriptions in SmartMet
• Querydata producer names
• Server directory structure
• Executing script
• qdcontour legacy querydata rendering program for drawing animations.

How to call the command line tools from scripts

The most common scripting languages used in production are:

1. Bash shell scripts
2. PHP
3. Perl.

Most of the tools handling massive amounts of weather data are written in C++. Many of the tools are named qdsomething to remind the user one is processing querydata.

In bash scripts, using the C++ tools is very straight forward: one simply uses the command in the script as one would do it in the command line. Here is how one would direct temperature forecasts into a a file:

qdpoint -p Arima -P Temperature > results.txt

In PHP and Perl, the situation is different. One must use the system command, or one of its siblings, like the PHP backquotes ``. The previous example would be done like this:

system("qdpoint -p Arima -P Temperature > results.txt")

However, it is more typical to store the result directly into a variable like this (in PHP):

$forecast = `qdpoint -p Arima -P Temperature`;