WRF output converted to NCL, FMRC not reading in times #2
Description
For USEast WRF and COAWST-WRF, we haven't been saving the entire dataset, only some of the fields. wrfouts are huge and we derive some additional fields using NCL. The time fields are pushed over from the wrfout as an array of characters in a netcdf file I generate using NCL. I've included some sample ncl output files for reference (off GitHub because of the 100MB limit).
jbzambon@oceanus:~$ ncks -v Times 20160830.nc
Times: type NC_CHAR, 2 dimensions, 0 attributes, chunked? no, compressed? no, packed? no
Times size (RAM) = 25_19_sizeof(NC_CHAR) = 475*1 = 475 bytes
Times dimension 0: Time, size = 25 (Record non-coordinate dimension)
Times dimension 1: DateStrLen, size = 19 (Non-coordinate dimension)
Time[0] DateStrLen[0] Times[0--18]='2016-08-30_00:00:00'
Time[1] DateStrLen[0] Times[19--37]='2016-08-30_03:00:00'
....
Time[24] DateStrLen[0] Times[456--474]='2016-09-02_00:00:00'
As you can see, the array is very similar to ISO8601 formatted date strings. Any suggestion on how to rework these files so that FMRC can read them to create the "best" dataset?
Simply setting "_CoordinateModelRunDate" seems like it would get the initialization, but subsequent forecast times would be missing. At the moment I'm getting errors in FMRC trying to find the run dates, even with a simple test file referenced in the xml (useast_WRF_nf_catalog.xml; attached). I played around with dateFormatMark and other #yyyyMMdd# settings to no avail...
[2016-08-31T19:33:15.044+0000] WARN ucar.nc2.ft.fmrc.GridDatasetInv: GridDatasetInv using gds.getStartDate() for run date = [null, /home/jbzambon/20160830.nc]
[2016-08-31T19:33:15.045+0000] ERROR ucar.nc2.ft.fmrc.Fmrc: makeFmrcInv
java.lang.IllegalStateException: No run date