I would like to extract surface winds from the archived EDAS data into ESRI Shape "shp" format,
MapInfo "mif" format, or something similar. Is this possible?
The PC HYSPLIT installation contains a meteorological data contouring program called
display. You can set the GIS switch to get a "generate" format text file.
This text file can then be run through the ascii2shp utility program to
create the ESRI Shapefiles. However, there are two problems. The display
program only generates the ascii GIS output for contours. Hence you get U
and V component maps rather than vectors. The VECT option has no ASCII
output option. Second the contours are usually cutoff on the map boundaries
and therefore it is not possible to specify "polygon" for the Shapefile
conversion; you must use the "line" option which results in lines rather
than closed contours.
Roland Draxler