[Cosmic_announce] Change in BUFR file header

[Doug Hunt]

Hi all:  In order to get cosmic BUFR files (bfrPrf) on the GTS, we need to 
make a small change to the header bytes at the beginning of the bfrPrf 
files.

Currently, the header of a "WMO message" is being sent, which starts 
with:

00000000: 010d 0d0a 2d2d 2d0d 0d0a 4955 5446 3134  ....---...IUTF14
00000010: 204b 5742 4320 3131 3030 3131 0d0d 0a42   KWBC 110011...B
00000020: 5546 5200 2104 0300 0012 0000 3c00 0003  UFR.!.......<...

In order to get the NESDIS DDS system to accept these files,
they need to have the WMO starting line:

[SOH][cr][cr][lf]nnn  Where nnn is 0-999 sequence number

replaced by a 'Flag Field Separator':

####018008476####[lf]

where 018 is the flag field separator length and 008476 is the BUFR 
message length.

So, the new files will start like this:

00000000: 2323 2323 3031 3830 3038 3437 3623 2323  ####018008476###
00000010: 230a 0d0d 0a49 5554 4a31 3420 4b57 4243  #....IUTJ14 KWBC
00000020: 2031 3032 3335 390d 0d0a 4255 4652 0021   102359...BUFR.!

My understanding is that any good BUFR decoder will skip past
these initial bytes.

The new files will have a 0001.0006_bufr suffix.  They will start being 
produced tomorrow.

Regards,

   Doug Hunt

dhunt at ucar.edu
Software Engineer III
UCAR - COSMIC, Tel. (303) 497-2611