NCL Home > Documentation > Functions > Regridding, Interpolation, Lat/Lon functions

bin_avg

Calculates gridded binned averages and counts using randomly spaced data.

Available in version 5.1.0 or later.

Prototype

	function bin_avg (
		zlon [*] : numeric ,  
		zlat [*] : numeric ,  
		z    [*] : numeric ,  
		glon [*] : numeric ,  
		glat [*] : numeric ,  
		opt  [1] : logical    
	)

Arguments

zlon

Longitudes of the observations (z).

zlat

Latitudes of the observations (z).

z

Observation values.

glon

Longitudes of the output grid. These must be equally spaced.

glat

Latitudes of the output grid. These must be equally spaced but may have different spacing than used for glon.

opt

Option. Currently not used. Set to False.

Return value

A grid of the size defined by glon and glat. The grid spacing must be equally spaced: eg: 1x1, 2x4, etc. The output array will be of type double if any of the input is double, and of type float otherwise.

Description

This function averages values z contained within the rectilinear array defined by the input grid glon, glat. This takes advantage of the fact the latitude and longitude grid spacing is required to be constant. As noted in the argument description, the spacing in the latitude and longitude directions need not be equal. The appropriate grid point subscripts are determined via a simple algorithm.

See Also

bin_sum, triple2grid, triple2grid2d, poisson_grid_fill

Examples

Example 1

Assume zlon, zlat and zVal are one-dimensional (1D) arrays. Let lon and lat be 1D arrays of length M and N which specify grid locations. Then: 

   grid = bin_avg(zlon,zlat,zVal, lon,lat, False)
will return a 2-dimensional array of size NxM. Sometimes there are gaps in the returned array. If none are desired, then one approach would be to use poisson_grid_fill.