BUFR/PREPBUFR Tutorial | Practice 3: GSI BUFR Interfaces

Introduction

This practice is to provide more detailed practices for users who need to work with GSI on observation ingesting from BUFR files.

Get the Codes and compile

Please go to the Examples/GSI BUFR Interface to download the four GSI BUFR interface files to a location space:

• read_prepbufr.f90
• read_gps.f90
• read_bufrtovs.f90
• read_airs.f90

If user put the above files in a directory called ./util/GSI_bufr_interface under the GSI main directory of the release version 3.0. Then, please download this makefile and save it in directory: ./util/GSI_bufr_interface. User can compile these four fortran files using:

./make

Here we assume users have compiled community GSI version 3.0.
If users use other directories other than the above suggested, the makefile needs to be modified to link to the right BUFRLIB library and GSI include files.

Once compiled, 4 executables will show up in working directory:

• read_airs.exe
• read_bufrtovs.exe
• read_gps.exe
• read_prepbufr.exe

Try with NCEP BUFR files

Users can use observation files (here (272M)) for GSI tutorial to test three interface files. After move the tar file to directory ./util/GSI_bufr_interface and untar the file, a directory 2011060212/ will show up in the working directory.

To test read_prepbufr.exe:

ln -s 2011060212/obs/nam.t12z.prepbufr.tm00.nr.le prepbufr
./read_prepbufr.exe

To test read_gps.exe:

ln -s 2011060212/obs/gdas1.t12z.gpsro.tm00.bufr_d.le gpsbufr
./read_gps.exe

To test read_bufrtovs.exe:

ln -s 2011060212/obs/gdas1.t12z.1bmhs.tm00.bufr_d.le bufrtovs
./read_bufrtovs.exe
To check other TOVS radiance files, the observation type has to be changed to:
obstype='amsua' to run
ln -s 2011060212/obs/gdas1.t12z.1bamua.tm00.bufr_d.le bufrtovs
./read_bufrtovs.exe
or
obstype='amsub' to run
ln -s 2011060212/obs/gdas1.t12z.1bamub.tm00.bufr_d.le bufrtovs
./read_bufrtovs.exe

There is no airs BUFR file in the tutorial case. We have to download the file again from (here (308M)) to the working directory. Then test the airs decoding as:

ln -s gdas1.t12z.airsev.tm00.bufr_d.le airsbufr
./read_airs.exe

User may notice that, except for ./read_bufrtovs.exe , these executables did not write observations or other information the screen. Users are suggested to change the code to write observations from the BUFR/PrepBUFR file to the screen for practice.

Also, please note we use little Endian BUFR files as the examples because we are running these executables on Linux machine.