Hello,
I'm glad that you're making progress.
RE: Station and buoy plots over the Caribbean:
If you go to the Point>Plot/Contour chooser, you can connect to adde.ucar.edu/RTPTSRC. Using the Point Type dropdown, select "RTPTSRC". This is hourly METAR data over the entire globe. You can subset a region in the Region tab of the Field Selector before creating the display. You can find bouy data by choosing the SHIPBUOY Point Type. I took a glance at the data in the SHIPBUOY dataset and I'm not seeing wave height. I'd suggest looking online for another source of this data. Even if you found something in CSV or text format you can load it through the General>Files/Directories chooser. You can create a gridded display of point data, or you can create a Point Data Plot display, which will plot individual data points. You can find more about these controls in the
Point Data Plot Controls page of the User's Guide. There is also a Point Data tutorial on the documentation page I linked to earlier that covers many different things you can do with point data in McIDAS-V.
Re: Rainfall prediction
Using the method in the 4-panel video I posted earlier, you can select "GFS > GFS Quarter Degree Forecast > Latest". Once you add this data source, in the Field Selector, under "2D > Forecast Radar Imagery" you'll see a field you can plot. This is the highest resolution GFS data over your domain, at 1/4 degree resolution. This seems to be a little under 30km resolution when plotted in the Main Display. There may be other global or regional models over your domain that we just don't have listed in McIDAS-V. If you are aware of any, and they're either CF-complaint netCDF or GRIB (grb1 or grb2) you should be able to load them in as a gridded data source through the General>Files/Directories chooser.
Re: Capturing images or animations
After displaying data, you can go to View>Capture and choose either Image or Movie. For Image, you can choose PNG or other common types including GIF or JPG. For movie, you can choose GIF or MOV. See more on the
Image and Movie Capture Controls page of the User's Guide.
Re: Scheduling tasks
I'd suggest you investigate Polling, which is described on the
Data Sources page of the User's Guide. Polling is a setting that's applied individually to data sources. For example, say you loaded in and displayed a loop of the 5 most recent GOES-16 band 13 images centered over your domain. You could set the GOES-16 data source to update every 10 minutes. This means at 10-minute intervals, McIDAS-V will check to see if any new images are available. If they are, they'll be loaded in and your display will be updated to show the 5 most recent images.
We recently had another user ask about scheduling things to run from the background in a script, where every x-number of minutes a script would run to display a loop of data and create an animation. If this sounds interesting to you, you can see
this forum post. If you investigate scripting further, many of the functions are documented in the User's Guide and there are a couple scripting tutorials available online.
Thanks,
Bob