MSAS AWIPS Troubleshooting Guide

Solutions to potential MSAS problems

• Corrupt grids

It's possible that MSAS grids can become corrupted. In these cases, persistence grids need to be eliminated to give the system a clean start. To do so, "restart" through the LDAD Monitoring and Control System, or access PX1 and PX2 and type:
 

cd /awips/fxa/ldad/MSAS
./WFOA_MSAS_Restart
 
 
• Bullseyes associated with bad observations not flagged as bad

MSAS utilizes observation quality control information provided by the AWIPS Quality Control and Monitoring System (QCMS) (described in the D2D User Guide, section 8). Occasionally, bad observations will pass through the automated quality control checks provided by the QCMS, without being flagged as bad. In these cases, bullseyes may appear in the MSAS grids. To eliminate the bullseyes, add the offending station to the QCMS reject list, and follow the procedures above to provide a clean start.
 
 

• Lack of detail associated with good observations flagged as bad

Good observations can sometimes be incorrectly labeled as bad by the QCMS, and therefore not be considered by the MSAS analyses. In these cases, the analyses may not contain the detail reflected in the observational database. To force the ingest of an observation, add the desired station to the QCMS accept list, and follow the procedures above to provide a clean start.

The accept and reject lists read by the MSAS system for each run time are output in the following files:
 

/awips/fxa/ldad/MSAS/output/accept.out.*
/awips/fxa/ldad/MSAS/output/reject.out.*

 
 
• Missing grids, observations, and QC messages

If all of the products produced by MSAS/QCMS are missing, it may have been caused by a bad /data/fxa/LDAD/fslparms/autorej.txt file. A bad file might be of zero size, or its first lines might look like this:

end--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Example Entries *************************************************************************************************
KGCC      |METAR     |1     |1     |0     |0     |1     |0     |0     |0    |0     |0     |0     |0     |0     |0
WPG       |METAR     |0     |1     |0     |0     |0     |0     |0     |0    |1     |0     |0     |0     |0     |0
4010      |UDFCD     |0     |0     |0     |0     |0     |1     |0     |0    |0     |0     |0     |0     |0     |0
*****************************************************************************************************************

If this is the problem, the fix is to put a fresh copy of the file in place. Here is the link to the fresh copy.

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