[Met_help] MET Question

[Derek.Stratman at noaa.gov]

First, allow me to introduce myself.  I'm a meteorology graduate student at Oklahoma 
University, and my Master's research entails using MET in the verification of storm scale 
models.  My research advisor is Mike Coniglio of NOAA/NSSL, and I'm also working with Tara 
Jensen of NCAR/DTC and Steve Koch of GSD.  

Recently, I've successfully ran the GridStat tool in MET, but I have a question about the 
output from GridStat and the other MET tools, as well.  When a calculation fails due to 
missing data, the MET tools output "N/A" in place of a numeric value.  Is it possible to output 
a numeric value, such as "-999", instead?  

I'm using NCL to read in the data and then plot it, but it's difficult to read in data with "N/A" 
stuck in at random places.  NCL can skip those "N/A"s, but that also means it skips individual 
columns, which offsets the data in each column. 

Thanks so much for the future help!

Derek Stratman