id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	version	resolution	keywords	cc
274	"Simple ""ascii2ropp"" background field generator"	Ian Culverwell	Ian Culverwell	"The principal recommendation from the ROPP6.0 beta reviewer was for a modest and simple tool for converting an ASCII file containing columns for altitude, temperature, humidity, and pressure (and their errors) to background files in ROPP format. If a tool for extracting background files from global EC GCM forecasts could be provided in the ROPP package, specifying the errors in a similar way as it is donewith the ropp_1dvar_add_refrac_error tool, this would be an even more useful add-on.

The ""grib2ropp"" tool is ticketed elsewhere (#205), but a simple ascii2ropp interface should be simple - perhaps by means of a namelist? 

Kent Bækgaard Lauritsen at DMI said that they have a tool to convert background ECMWF GRIB data, dumped out in ascii format, into ROPP netCDF format. I'm not sure yet that we want to restrict ourselves to ""ASCII-from-ECGRIB"" input data (hence the remark about namelists), but this is worth investigating. (He suggested the name ""bgrasc2ropp"" for the tool.)
"	enhancement	closed	normal	7.0	ROPP (all)	5.0	fixed