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WRF

Contours Only

This page is rather out-of-date. We recommend that you visit the more up-to-date WRF-ARW Online Tutorial for examples of using NCL to plot WRF-ARW data.

In many cases a simple contour plot without a map or lat/long coordinates is desired. These examples demonstrate the use of gsn_csm_contour. A small sample of the many additional contour effects is available.

WRF_cn_1.ncl: A simple plane view of the pressure field at a specific time and level.

chartostring, is used to convert the times variable (which is of type character) to type string for plotting purposes.

The default contour mode is black and white. Setting the cnFillOn turns on color. NCL's default color map contains very distinct colors. It is generally not used for contour plots. Learn more about color techniques.
WRF_cn_2.ncl: This creates an eta-longitude cross-section at a specific time and latitude.

The gsn_csm_contour graphical interface recognizes certain "units" attributes (eg, "degrees_north" and "degrees_east") that conform to the COARDS, CSM and CF netCDF convention and will label the axis appropriately.

To emphasize contours of different sign, the BlReWh color map is specified. To obtain the desired effect, symMinMaxPlt is used to determine the appropriate contour limits.
WRF_cn_3.ncl: Creates an eta-latitude cross-section at a specific time and longitude.

sprintf allows the user to control the label format.
WRF_cn_4.ncl: An eta-time contour plot that requires dimension reordering to reshape the data.

lbOrientation = "vertical", changes the label bar orientation.