McIDAS-X Learning Guide
Version 2020

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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/RTGOESR/CONUSC13
   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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