Welcome back to AWIPS Tips!
Is there a configuration that you want changed, but not affect others? In this blog, we’ll show an example of how you can create a user configuration override. In this example, we are going to change the displayed units for Wind Speed Arrows from knots to mph.
We will start by opening up the localization perspective in CAVE > Perspective > Localization. This should remove your D2D (map) perspective and now show file navigation on the left hand side.
Open up D2D > Style Rules > d2dArrowStyleRules.xml
NOTE: Depending on if you are trying to change contours vs images vs arrows, you’ll have to select the correct styleRule to edit.
You’ll see there’s probably just a BASE file listed there. Remember from the last blog, users shouldn’t (and can’t) edit the BASE file, so you’ll need to create a user override.
Right click on BASE and select Copy To > User. You should now see a new file appear as USER with your username@computer.
Double click on that file, and it should open up the file in the center of your screen. You can tell which version (BASE or USER) of the file you are editing by looking at the tab on the top.
NOTE: If you are not seeing what looks like an xml file, in the bottom left click the source tab
Look through the file to find the variable you are looking for (sometimes they may be abbreviated). Here we’re looking for “Wind” and “Gust”. You should see the styleRule tag for this around line 127.
We can then change the displayUnits from kts to mph.
As a best practice, since this is the only styleRule we want to change, we should remove the rest of the styleRules in this file. If you recall, as a user override file, this will override ALL changes in BASE (and SITE), so if the base file gets updated for another parameter we won’t see that change. This type of CAVE configuration file is an incremental override file, indicating that the files at different localization levels will be combined (as stated in the xml comments at the beginning of the file).
Once you have saved your changes, switch back to the D2D perspective, clear your map, and reload the data (Models > GFS 20km > Sfc Temperature and Wind). You should see that your wind arrows are now displaying in mph without having to restart CAVE!
Check back in two weeks for the next blog post, where we’ll look into regional obs surface plots in python-awips.
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