NCL Graphics: WRF (static)

This suite of examples may use an older and deprecated method of plotting WRF data. We recommend that you visit the more up-to-date WRF-ARW Online Tutorial for examples of using NCL to plot WRF-ARW data.

The file used in the 'static' examples is different from the WRF 'wrfout_' used in several other examples. For example the 'wrfout_' files use the file attribute MAP_PROJ to indicate the map projection (1 = LambertConformal, 2 = Stereographic, 3 = Mercator) while this 'static' file uses a character variable "grid_type" to indicate the map projection. The easist way to determine the grid type is to use the ncdump utility which is distributed with netCDF.

ncdump -v grid_type file_name.nc

The grid_type may entered into the plot script. If the grid_type is listed as "secant (or tangent) Lambert Conformal" one should use mpProjection = "LambertConformal".

The variables on this file are stored as four dimensional (record, z, y, x). However, both the "record" and "z" dimensions are of size 1. All the examples read the variables to be plotted as x = f->X(0,0,:,:). In this case, x will be a 2D variable z(y,x).