Describe the Problem

During review of #2294 for issue #2276, a problem was discovered in the output of the ascii2nc_airnow_hourly test in unit_ascii2nc.xml. The output file created by this test (HourlyData_20220312.nc) contains values of Infinity (Inf). While the GHA run for that PR did increase the occurrence of Inf in the output, the problem existed prior to those code changes.

This issue is to investigate the source of the Inf values appearing in the output, and fix the code to avoid them.

Expected Behavior

The output of ascii2nc should never contain a value of infinity. The code should be enhanced by adding more error checking to avoid them. Perhaps, they should be reported as bad data value (i.e. -9999) rather than Inf?

Note that while Inf appears on seneca in 33 of 13738 lines, there are over 200 of them when run via GHA.

Environment

Describe your runtime environment:
1. Visible in the output of GHA and in the output of the MET nightly build on seneca.

To Reproduce

Describe the steps to reproduce the behavior:
1. Log on to 'seneca'
2. Go to NB area:

cd /d1/projects/MET/MET_regression/develop/NB20221018

*3. Dump to ascii:

Rscript MET-develop/scripts/Rscripts/pntnc2ascii.R MET-develop/test_output/ascii2nc/airnow/HourlyData_20220312.nc > HourlyData_20220312.txt

4. See error in columns 6 and 9 of the output:

 grep Inf HourlyData_20220312.txt  | wc -l
33

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