title: Grib2 to PostGIS raster -- anyone get this to work?
body: <p>I have an application for which I need to import U.S. National Weather Service surface analyses, which are distributed as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRIB" rel="nofollow">grib2</a> files. I want to pull those into PostGIS 2.0 rasters, do some calculations and modeling, and display the data and model results in GeoServer.</p>
  
  <p>Since grib2 is a GDAL-supported format, the supplied raster2pgsql utility should be able to slurp a grib2 right into PostGIS-compatible SQL, and once it's there, GeoServer ought to be able to handle it. However, I'm running into problems which have no obvious solutions -- not obvious to me, at any rate! Raster2pgsql runs, apparently without errors, producing SQL, and running the SQL creates what looks very much like a raster. But GeoServer can't display it -- the bounds, in particular, come out looking weird (0,0 -1,-1) and "preview layer" just throws a NullPointerException.</p>
  
  <p>Has anyone been down this road already? I've got issues as basic as not knowing what the SRID should be for the data (4326, perhaps?). I don't expect anyone to debug my problems for me but if someone has already got this toolchain working, or part of it, I can plug known-good things in and see what I can discover.</p>
  
  <p>TIA,</p>
  
  <p>rw</p>
  
  <p>Updated: Per Mike, here is the coordinate-system stuff from one of the files; I elided the other 749 bands in the output from "gdalinfo". Note that the filename is different -- I found out by running "gdalinfo" on my original file that something was wrong with it, gdalinfo couldn't read it. New (35MB!) file <a href="http://www.soils.wisc.edu/~wayne/ruc2.t00z.bgrb13anl.grib2" rel="nofollow">here</a>.</p>
  
  <p>Gdalinfo output:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Driver: GRIB/GRIdded Binary (.grb)
  Files: ruc2.t00z.bgrb13anl.grib2
  Size is 451, 337
  Coordinate System is:
  PROJCS["unnamed",
      GEOGCS["Coordinate System imported from GRIB file",
          DATUM["unknown",
              SPHEROID["Sphere",6371229,0]],
          PRIMEM["Greenwich",0],
          UNIT["degree",0.0174532925199433]],
      PROJECTION["Lambert_Conformal_Conic_2SP"],
      PARAMETER["standard_parallel_1",25],
      PARAMETER["standard_parallel_2",25],
      PARAMETER["latitude_of_origin",0],
      PARAMETER["central_meridian",265],
      PARAMETER["false_easting",0],
      PARAMETER["false_northing",0]]
  Origin = (-3332155.288903323933482,6830293.833488883450627)
  Pixel Size = (13545.000000000000000,-13545.000000000000000)
  Corner Coordinates:
  Upper Left  (-3332155.289, 6830293.833) (139d51'22.04"W, 54d10'20.71"N)
  Lower Left  (-3332155.289, 2265628.833) (126d 6'34.06"W, 16d 9'49.48"N)
  Upper Right ( 2776639.711, 6830293.833) ( 57d12'21.76"W, 55d27'10.73"N)
  Lower Right ( 2776639.711, 2265628.833) ( 68d56'16.73"W, 17d11'55.33"N)
  Center      ( -277757.789, 4547961.333) ( 98d 8'30.73"W, 39d54'5.40"N)
  Band 1 Block=451x1 Type=Float64, ColorInterp=Undefined
    Description = 1[-] HYBL="Hybrid level"
    Metadata:
      GRIB_UNIT=[Pa]
      GRIB_COMMENT=Pressure [Pa]
      GRIB_ELEMENT=PRES
  [Etc., Etc., for all 750 bands]
  </code></pre>