Table of Contents - The Atmospheric Studies Group at TRC

Section 7: Prognostic Meteorological Interfaces
CALRUC Input Files
RUC GRIB file
RUC model output files can be downloaded directly from the NCEP or NWS web site. The NCEP web
site address is
ftpprd.ncep.noaa.gov:/pub/data/nccf/com/ruc/prod/
The NWS web site address is
tgftp.nws.noaa.gov:/SL.us008001/ST.opnl.
The files at the NCEP web site reside in sub-directories named:
ruc2a.YYYYMMDD
or
ruc2b.YYYYMMDD
where YYYY is the 4-digit year, MM is the two-digit month, and DD is the two-digit day. Use the data
in ruc2b.YYYYMMDD if it exists.
The files at the NWS web site reside in sub-directories named:
MT.ruc_CY.HH/RD.YYYYMMDD/PT.grid.DF.gr1
where HH is the initial hour of RUC run in UTC, and YYYY is the 4-digit year, MM is the two-digit
month, and DD is the two-digit day.
File names at NCEP and NMS are different, but the contents of corresponding files are the same. Table
7-18 lists the file name formats. In the table, HH represents initial time of RUC runs, and hh or hhhh
represents valid forecast hours corresponding to the initial hour of the RUC run. The current version of
CALRUC uses a different naming convention, as indicated in Table 7-18. Files downloaded from NCEP
or NWS web sites must be renamed as indicated prior to running CALRUC. Note that the hybrid level
versions of the RUC GRIB files are preferred for preparing 3D.DAT files for CALMET.
CALRUC.INP
In CALRUC.INP, the user specifies the beginning and ending dates, output time interval, path of input
CALRUC files, output file names, the RUC grid and data type, the output format, horizontal and vertical
ranges for extraction, and a user-defined shift to apply to geopotential heights. An example of
CALRUC.INP is given in Table 7-19 and described in Table 7-20. In CALRUC.INP, the content after
“!” is made up of comments that are not read by the program. There should be no blank space at the
beginning of any records, but there should be at least on blank space before “!” if it exists.
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