Similar to other data readers, Reader+ is launched from the right-click context menu from a TIN node, as shown below. This will bring up the Reader+ editor.

The Reader+ Editor provides an interface for specifying the necessary settings to perform data processing and merging, and user controls to edit the data. This editor is broken up into two tabs: Setup and Edits.

Configuration File

At the top of the Reader+ editor (see image below), there is a field displaying the Reader+ Configuration File location. This is a non-editable location within the project. This file holds all settings from the Reader+ editor and is in the MetCalculator JSON format.

Setup Tab

The Setup tab contains multiple panels: Preprocessing Settings, Select Data, Preprocessing Operations, Merged Grid Definition, and Spatial Data Writer.

In the Preprocessing Settings, the target time window, Time Step, Data Type, Parameter and Units are specified. The Start Time and End Time are the bounds of the data to be loaded, and the time that the output data will cover. The Start Time and End Time may be specified by either explicit or relative methods. The Time Step defines the time step to which the data will be preprocessed. For example, if the input data is at a 6-hour time step, and the Time Step specified in Reader+ is 1-hour, Reader+ will disaggregate the data to a 1-hour time step. Similarly, the Data Type is the target data type after preprocessing. This may be PER-CUM (generally used for precipitation), PER-AVER and INST-VAL. The Parameter is a label representing the type of data (precipitation, temperature, etc) and will be set on the resulting grids. Finally, the Units will be the units of the resulting grids. Generally, this will match the display settings, but that is not required.

Following the Preprocessing Settings is the Select Data table. This table contains the datasets that will be loaded, preprocessed and merged. This table contains a Priority, Product Name and Variable Name for each Data Product. The Priority is used when merging data. In the example below, there are three data products, each with a different priority. Since HRRR has the priority of 1, it will be used for time steps in which its data is available. If HRRR is not available for a given time step, the merge process will attempt to get the data from NBM-QPF06, and finally NAEFS if neither HRRR or NBM-QPF06 has data. The priority may be changed by editing the priority column, after which the table will reorder itself to maintain ascending order in priority. The Product Name column displays the name specified for the data product and allows for the user to alter the name. The Variable Name column is the name of the selected variable, which is not editable in this table. In order to add a data product to the table, the Add button may be used. Editing of a data product may be performed with the Editbutton. The Remove button will remove the selected row from the table.

For each Data Product, there are preprocessing settings, including Time Step Regularization, Data Screening, Fill Temporal Gaps in Data and Fill Missing Cells in Data options. Time Step Regularization for PER-CUM data can be performed with a transformation pattern, but PER-AVER data is always transformed in a uniform manner and INST-VAL data is interpolated. The Transformation Pattern allows for selection of a pattern from several predefined patterns and a checkbox to make the pattern alternating. Alternating the transformation pattern is useful when disaggregating precipitation, as the flood potential is maximized by packing the precipitation into a smaller time window. This is achieved by using a transformation pattern that pushes the precipitation to the start or end of the input time step, then alternating that pattern, leading to two consecutive output grids containing the total precipitation across two input grids. Data screening has a minimum and maximum value, and any values that fall outside this range are replaced with a specified value or missing option from the drop-down menu. Fill Temporal Gaps in Data allows for filling of entire grids. This is generally as Leave Missing in the Preprocessing Operations, as that will allow the prioritization to select lower priority Data Products for those time-steps when a higher priority Data Product has missing data. Finally, the Fill Missing Cells in Data allows for filling that are missing data within a single time step.

The Merged Grid Definition section provides the controls over the output grid. Each input will be projected onto that grid as a first step in the preprocessing, ensuing that the Data Products are consistent prior to merging. Within this section, the target coordinate system may be specified with a drop-down menu, and custom coordinate systems may be defined through the "Edit..." button to the right of the Coordinate System drop-down menu. In the lower left of this section is the grid definition section, where the grid origin, width, height and resolution may be specified. The origin is specified in the target coordinate system, and the cell size is in the units defined by the coordinate system. In the example below, the units are "m*2000", noting that the coordinate system is a Standard Hydrologic Grid (SHG), which has 2000-meter grid cells. On the lower right side of the Merged Grid Definition settings, there is an option to set the extents from the input data or shapefiles. When the user clicks the "Input Data" button, the panel will find the combined extents of all Data Products specified in the Select Data table and populate the grid definition fields with those extents. Alternatively, the "Shapefile" button will allow the user to select shapefiles from the available background/basin average maps for the current Map Window, or to browse for a different shapefile. When using the "Shapefile" button, the combined extents of the selected shapefiles will be used to populate the grid definition fields.

Finally, the Spatial Data Writer section supports writing of the resulting grids from the Reader+ computations. Grids may be written in either DSS or ASCII. For ASCII, file masking to allow for writing a file for each time step. For DSS, the D and E parts will be filled appropriately for each time step.

Edits Tab

The Edits tab has three sections: Graphical Editing, Tabular Editing, Edit Settings, Data Product Difference Highlighting and Time Series Sampling. Within the Graphical and Tabular edit sections, the aerial average time series from the grids may be reviewed. These include the input (raw) and preprocessed data from each of the Data products, and the Merged data. This can be seen in the image below, where preprocessing and merging has been performed. Within the table, there are visual cues to note when data has been edited or there is disagreement between the Data Products. When the data has been edited (input and preprocessed time series differ by more than 0.05), then the cell on the preprocessed time series will be bolded. If the values in the preprocessed time series is inconsistent (any two of the preprocessed time series differ by more than 1.0), the cells for that time step are highlighted in yellow. See the second example below.

In the Edit Settings panel, the user can select temporal data filling, missing cells filling, and the merging rule. Similar to the preprocessing settings, missing data may be filled in the merged data. Additionally, there is a Data Merging rule for combining grids from products with the same priority. The options for merging are average, minimum and maximum.

In the Data Product Difference Highlighting Panel, a single field is provided for specifying the tolerance beyond which differences in the Data Products will be highlighted with yellow. This tolerance is always in the display units, which match the units described in the Setup tab.

In the Time Series Sampling panel, the user can select the whole grid, or a shape from one of the polygons in one of the shapefiles. When this selection is changes, the lines in the graph panel will change, but the underlying data is not changed.

Example of the tabular editing table when there are edited and disagreeing values. In the HRRR column, the values for the 21Jan2024 0200 and 21Jan2024 0400 rows are bolded, as those have been edited. Additionally, the 21Jan2024 0400 row has highlighted cells, showing the disagreement between the different preprocessed time series beyond a tolerance of 1.

Saving, Computing and Log

At the bottom of the Reader+ editor, there are four buttons: Save Settings, Run Preprocessing, Run Merging and Display Log. The Save Settings button allows the user to push settings in the Reader+ editor to the Reader+ configuration file, allowing it to be reloaded, The Run Preprocessing button will run the preprocessing for each Data Product and load the data into the Edits tab. If the preprocessing has already run, the user will be prompted after clicking the Run Preprocessing button warning that this will overwrite existing edits to the preprocessed data. The Run Merging will perform the merging of the Data Products. If the Data Products have not been preprocessed when the user clicks the Run Merging button, then the preprocessing and merging will both be performed. If the Data Products have been preprocessed, then the merging will be performed from the cached preprocessed data. When merging the Data Products, any edits performed on the preprocessed data will be included in the merging. Therefore, if the user increases the values in one of the Data Product time series in the Edits tab, the Merged time series will reflect that after the Run Merging button is clicked. Finally, the Display Log button will display a log of the computations

Below is an example of the Preprocessing and Merging log from the examples earlier in this page. This log shows that Preprocessing was performed for HRRR, NBM-QPF06 and NAEFS. For each of these data products, the data was read from DSS, projected onto a consistent grid, data was filled in missing cells, data was disaggregated from 6hour to 1hour for NBM-QPF06 and NAEFS, and the parameter name was set to Precipitation. From the merging log, the only necessary operation was performing selection of data based on priority, where HRRR was used from 21Jan2024 0000 - 21Jan2024 1800 GMT, NBM-QPF06 was used from 21Jan2024 1800 - 28Jan2024 0000 GMT and NAEFS was used from 28Jan2024 0000 - 04Feb2024 0000 GMT.