Storing soundings in SPDB

Overview

Thermodynamic soundings are important in RadxPid because temperature helps distinguish between liquid and frozen hydrometeors. Soundings can be ingested into RadxPid in three ways:

• entered manually in the PID thresholds file - only one sounding is allowed.
• estimated from model output (Grib2toMdv, Mdv2SoundingSpdb) - this is the preferred method.
• observed sounding downloaded and converted from native format to SPDB - described below.

The second and third method both require data or output to be converted to an SPDB database file, which is a non-gridded file. This page describes how to convert Grib2 and TTAA/TTBB files to SPDB.