Output

When PB2NC is finished, you'll see a summary of how many PrepBufr messages were processed, retained, and rejected for various reasons. In that output, we see that 69833 PrepBufr messages were processed of which only 8415 were retained. And from those 8415 messages, 62443 observation values were extracted.

You may view the output NetCDF file that PB2NC wrote using the ncdump utility (if available on your machine). Run the following command to view the header of the NetCDF output file:

In the NetCDF header, we see that the file contains 22 variables. The obs_ variables contain information about the observations while the hdr_ arrays contain information about the observing location, type, and time. See the comments in the ncdump output for more details.

When processing Global GDAS PrepBufr observations, users should note that the quality marker is set to a value of 9 for surface observations. This is done to prevent them from being used in the data assimilation process. However, these observations will not be retained by the default PB2NC configuration. Users may configure PB2NC with quality_mark_thesh = 9; to retain GDAS surface observations.