WEATHER RESEARCH
AND FORECASTING (WRF) MODEL

[WRF ARW OnLine Tutorial | WRF-VAPOR | wrfhelp@ucar.edu]

The following are a series of example plots using data from a 'real-data' case. The WRF netCDF files used are different from netCDF files produced by the component models of the Community Climate System Model (CESM). For example, the CESM grids do not change with time while the WRF model(s) allow for this possibility by making the latitude and longitude arrays a function of time. NCL can readily read and process WRF netCDF files. However, some software processing tools may require data files to be Climate and Forecast (CF) convention conformant. For this situation, there is an NCL script (wrfout_to_cf.ncl) that will translate the original WRF files to CF conformant netCDF. Note: the "wrfout_to_cf.ncl" script is not supported by the NCL team.

The examples that follow were written prior to the creation of the WRF supported NCL graphical routines that are packaged as part of the WRF model. For help with the WRF model routines, please visit the WRF ARW OnLine Tutorial web page. If you need help with these tools, send email to wrfhelp@ucar.edu. An effort is underway to merge these two sets of graphical routines and make them all part of the NCL distribution.

While the latitude and longitude arrays may change with time, this is currently not the case in general. The examples which follow have grids which do not change with time. Hence, they extract the appropriate latitude and longitude arrays from the initial time and use them for all subsequent plots.

WRF-related questions should be sent to wrfhelp@ucar.edu.

NCL-related questions should be sent to ncl-talk.

Note about WRF-NMM data: WRF-NMM can be plotted with NCL after you used the WPP code to convert to grib format. The wrf_xxx built-in functions in theory can be used for any model - although they have not been tested. The problem is that all the wrf_xxx scripts have been written exclusively for WRF-ARW, and that is because the scripts handle the projection change from C to A, and also the map information. Since WRF-NMM is on a rotated E grid, the map information is very complicated to deal with.