McIDAS Learning Guide
Version 2015

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GUI - Plotting Weather Watches and Warnings

The Weather Watch GUI displays severe thunderstorm watches and warnings, tornado watches and warnings, winter storm watches and warnings, snow advisories, blizzard warnings, and flood watches and warnings. The GUI allows you to easily select which of these to plot, whether you want the watches plotted as watch boxes or county outlines, and whether you want the areas filled with a solid color, a transparent color, or just outlined. You can also select which map to use for the display and what time period to display.

In this exercise, you will plot the weather watches and warnings for the current time period.

  1. Plot the watches and warnings in the United States within the last three hours on frame 3.
    Select:  Display/Weather Watch
    The default of the weather watch GUI is to display all watches and warnings on a map of the United States, so for this example you will not need to modify anything on the Event Types tab except the frame selection, and nothing on the Map Settings tab.
    Select:  Show Frame/ALL FRAMES/3
    Click:   Day and Time
    Select:  Beginning Time/three hours ago
    Select:  Display and Dismiss
  2. Display an IR image over the United States on frame 4.
    Select:  Display/Image
    Select:  Select Frame/ALL FRAMES/4
    Select:  Dataset/EASTS/CONUS
    Select:  Sensor/Band/G-13 IMG/4
    Click:   the most recent image
    Click:   Load and Dismiss
  3. Plot your choice of watches and warnings on the image.
    Select:  Display/Weather Watch
    Select:  which watches and warnings you'd like to plot
    Click:   Map Settings
    Click:   Use Existing Frame Navigation
    Click:   Display and Dismiss

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