Enhance Gen-Vx-Mask shapefile masking to support multiple shapes and specify shape metadata.

[dwfncar]

Describe the Enhancement

This issue arose again via dtcenter/METplus#2155. Recommend at least supporting the specification of multiple -shapeno values. That would make the commands for this discussion MUCH easier.

In met-8.0, the gen_vx_mask tool can read shapefiles to define masking regions. The shape to be used is defined by the -shapeno command line option. Suggest making this more user friendly by...

1. Add support multiple shape numbers being specified. For example -shapeno 1,2 or -shapeno 1 -shapeno 2.
2. The gis_dump_dbf tool dumps metadata to the screen, including key=value pairs such as:

BASIN_ID = "MBRFC"

Consider adding a command line option to support specifying this metadata, such as:

-shape 'key="BASIN_ID"; val="MBRFC";'

And support multiple values as:

-shape 'key="BASIN_ID"; val="MBRFC,AKRFC";'

If multiple vals are specified for a given key, use all records whose value appears in the list.
If multiple keys are specified, only use records that match all of them.

Note that these 'key = ...; val = ...; settings can be parsed similar to the parse_conf_key_value_map() function. This map should be a mapping of unique ConcatString keys (BASIN_ID) to a StringArray of values (MBRFC,AKRFC,CNRFC).

Be sure to add detailed debug messages to the let the user know what the tool is doing.

Note that this will require reading the .dbf file.

The -shape option is really just a fancy/convenient way of setting the -shapeno setting. If both -shape and -shapeno are specified, use all unique records that are specified.

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• METplus, MET, METdataio, METviewer, METexpress, METcalcpy, METplotpy
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[JohnHalleyGotway]

This issue resurfaced during the NOAA telecon on 2/24/2020:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LNV1dkGF0pzOECqDdR8De6U-dRClHGt0ZYN6uujzx6A

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Logan, that’s a great example.  And yes, you’re correct. MET would write output for that same mask name 3 times.  There would be no way of differentiating the output. As for the impact on event equalization, I suppose you’re right.  When creating the scorecard, METviewer computes pairwise differences. And it would expect a single set of stats for the 2 input models.  And in your example, it’d get 3 for each model, which would result in an error.

One option would be computing stats over the UNION of the MRGL regions instead of processing them separately.  This is doable, but would just require the pre-processing calls to gen_vx_mask to be more sophisticated. You can run gen_vx_mask iteratively to compute the union of those 3 areas.

If we enhanced gen_vx_mask to enable the “-shapeno” command line option to support multiple arguments, that’d make this a lot easier.  You’d just say “-shapeno 0,3,4” assuming the MRGL areas are the 1st, 4,th, and 5th records (0-based). Or better yet, support “-shaperx MRGL” and have gen_vx_mask use regular expressions to figure out which records you want by reading the dbf file… or both.

[JohnHalleyGotway]

FYI, @Deba57 I'm working on this feature_1060_shapes branch for issue #1060 and have been able to get gen_vx_mask to support setting multiple shapes in a single run:

gen_vx_mask 'latlon 720 361 -90 -130 0.5 0.5' \
  ne_110m_admin_0_countries.shp mask.nc \
  -name Europe -type shape \
  -shapeno 18,21,43,110,111,112,113,114,115,116,117,118,119,120,121,122,123,125,126,127,128,129,130,131,132,133,141,142,143,144,150,151,152,153,170,171,172,173,174

The next task is further simplifying this to use all records where "CONTINENT = Europe".