We believe we have the format nearly correct. Most soundings now seem to work with our SHARP program here. However, we still experience crashes of SHARP if the sounding is modified. This may be because, when the dew point is missing, we have had to set the surface dewpoint depression to '99' in the MANDATORY portion of report, but to '//' in the SIG portion of the report. If you have problems, you might try changing the '//' in the surface SIG report to '99'. If SHARP reads the sounding at all, you should be able to modify it.
We're electing to make this data available now, in the hope that feedback from you will result in correct and robust input for SHARP eventually. Please send your feedback to Bill Moninger (Bill.Moninger@noaa.gov.)
SHARP also expects the site number in the input data to match a site
listed in SHARP's own location.dat file, which is
found in the same DOS directory as the SHARP program itself. SHARP's
location.dat file does not have all the airports from
which ACARS soundings are available.
We have generated an airport-location.dat file which includes
airports into which ACARS aircraft fly as of 6-Apr-98. If you wish,
you may ownload this new
airport-location.dat file and
paste its contents directly before the %END% line of
SHARP's location.dat file. (SHARP simply searches through
location.dat until it finds the desired ID number, so if
there are
duplicate ID numbers (which there are), SHARP will use the 'official'
data.)
SHARP requires ID numbers to be greater than 70000, so when we have had to make up ID numbers here at FSL, they start at 90001. The 90000 series doesn't seem to overlap with any WMO ID's, and is readable by SHARP.