VTECPartners

December 30, 2011

Table of Contents
Overview
Format
Modification Technique
Enabling the Sharing of VTEC Tables

Overview

The VTECPartners.py file is the baseline supplied configuration file for VTEC active table coordination. The file controls the following aspects of VTEC:

Definition of the national Storm Prediction Center VTEC id for use in the Merge VTEC and VTECDecoder routines.
List of coordination sites from which their VTEC active table will be retrieved and merged into our VTEC active table.
Coordination interval for active tables.
List of site filters used for VTEC decoding and merging.
Backup file purge time.
Text capture categories for the VTEC Decoder
Mapping of pils from initial issuance to update/cancel pils.

The localVTECPartners.py file is used to override baseline entries in the VTECPartners.py file.

Format

Contains a list of request sites. These are the AWIPS site identifiers (nominally 3-letters). Requests will be sent from EDEX to these sites at the interval specified in the VTEC_REMOTE_TABLE_FETCH_TIME entry.	VTEC_TABLE_REQUEST_SITES = []
The Tornado Watches and Severe Thunderstorm watches from SPC are handled differently than the local office watches. The tropical storm and hurricane watch/warnings are also handled differently. These entries identifies the VTEC site identifier for SPC and TPC.	VTEC_SPC_SITE = 'KWNS' VTEC_TPC_SITE = 'KNHC'
A site filter is applied when active tables from remote sites are merged into our active table. If this was not done, your active table would soon end up containing records from every site in the country. Your adjacent sites and your backup offices should be listed in this field. These entries are VTEC site identifiers, which are always 4-letters in length, such as KBOU. To not apply any filter, set this value to None (through localVTECPartners).	VTEC_MERGE_SITES = []
The VTECDecoder receives text bulletins from the AWIPS data stream and decodes them for VTEC entries. This entry is used to specify which site's will be included in the VTECDecoder stream. If a VTEC site id is detected in an incoming product and that site is not included in this list, the entry will be discarded. These entries are VTEC site identifiers, which are always 4-letters in length, such as PAFC. To not apply any filter, set this value to None (through localVTECPartners).	VTEC_DECODER_SITES = []
The VTECDecoder captures the segment text for each product. Only a few of the product formatters require this text. Since the text is large when compared with the size of the rest of the record, we only capture text for certain product categories. The VTEC_CAPTURE_TEXT_CATEGORIES defines the product categories for which we capture and save text into the active table. If this definition is changed, old records will also be updated and their text field possibly removed.	VTEC_CAPTURE_TEXT_CATEGORIES = ['WSW', 'NPW']
Remapping of product pils. This is required for certain VTEC events if a hazard is created in one pil and then updated or cancelled in another pil. Example is the TO.W (Tornado Warning), which is issued in the TOR pil but updated/cancelled in the SVS pil. In order for the table matching purging to work correctly, the pils in the followup products must be mapped back to the original. This is only for use for non-GFE/GHG issued products since the GHG logic uses the pil information to calculate VTEC. This is a dictionary of (phen,sig,pil) with the remapped pil as the value. These values should not be changed.	VTEC_MAPPED_PILS = { ('TO','W','SVS'): 'TOR', ('SV','W','SVS'): 'SVR', ('FF','W','FLS'): 'FFW', ('FL','W','FLS'): 'FLW', ('MA','W','MWS'): 'SMW', ('EW','W','SVS'): 'EWW', }
This entry defines the purge interval in hours for the backups of the active table. Each time the active table is updated, a backup copy is made.	VTEC_BACKUP_TABLE_PURGE_TIME = 168
This entry defines the coordination interval for updating your active table with adjacent site's active tables. It is specified in seconds.	VTEC_REMOTE_TABLE_FETCH_TIME = 60*60
This entry determines whether my sites will respond to VTEC table requests from other sites. If set to 1, then we will return our filtered VTEC table to the requestor site.	#VTEC_RESPOND_TO_TABLE_REQUESTS = 1
This section handles the default configuration for VTECPartners. Do not change this section. The first part of the section contains a dictionary of failed site, and its primary and secondary backup sites. Other functions are used to define the default values for the configuration. The import section deals with the localVTECPartners configuration file, which is used to override the baseline entries.	#-------------------------- #DO NOT CHANGE ANY CODE BELOW THIS NOTICE #--------------------------

Modification Technique

The modification technique requires the user to create a localVTECPartners.py file in the /awips2/edex/data/utility/common_static/site/SITE_ID/vtec directory and then override just those elements required. Refer to the localVTECPartners.py documentation.

Enabling Sharing of VTEC Table

Enabling Sharing of the VTEC Active Table is important in order to keep your active table in sync with other site's active tables. Normally, the active tables for the main site and backup site are kept up to date since they are fed by the same text bulletin data feed. However, if the AWIPS system was down and products were missed, or you are backing up a site that is far remote from your normal domain, the sharing of the VTEC active table is important. Sharing of the VTEC active table also will allow the site to recovery from a corrupted VTEC active table through manual intervention.

Sharing of the VTEC active table is accomplished through these steps:

Creation of a localVTECPartners.py file.
Enabling your site to respond to other requests for your active table.
Enabling your site to request other sites active table.
Restarting the EDEX.

Refer to the localVTECPartners.py documentation for more details on the syntax of the localVTECPartners.py file. Basically you will create a file in /awips2/edex/data/utility/common_static/site/SITE_ID/vtec called localVTECPartners.py and it will contain at least the following information:

import VTECPartners
from VTECPartners import *

VTEC_RESPOND_TO_TABLE_REQUESTS = 1
VTEC_REMOTE_TABLE_FETCH_TIME = 60*60 #60 minutes

Additionally you may want to specify the sites that you will request active tables from, although by default this is set up to be your primary and secondary backup sites, and sites that include you as their primary and secondary backup sites. You may want to pare down the list to only 2 or 3 sites to cut down on WAN traffic. If you want to modify the list, then you will have an additional entry such as:

VTEC_TABLE_REQUEST_SITES = ['DVN','DMX']

After you have enabled the sharing, you should examine your ingestAT, dumpAT, iscDataRec log files to ensure operations are working as desired.

Note: The sites specified in VTEC_TABLE_REQUEST_SITES do not represent AWIPS physical sites, but EDEX servers running the specified site domain. Thus if you specify 'DMX', the software will discover all of the EDEX servers on the network running the domain 'DMX' and choose one of the servers to request the VTEC table updates from. The software will first try to find a message handler ID that matches the domain id, with the known primary GFE location (dx3/98000000), and then will check other hosts and ports and perhaps different message handler ids for the 'DMX' domain. The log files will indicate where the requests are sent.