NCL learning

Post processing WRF is a big task, especially when different tasks come in different times. Most of the time I can find pretty simple (and beautiful) solutions in NCL, so I decided to learn more about it. I will add more to this post when I get new codes that are useful.

NCL means NCAR Command Language, and here is the official website. It is designed to handle the climate data, so WRF is kind of natively supported. It has a package called “WRFUserARW.ncl”, which is super helpful in processing WRF results.

NCL has 3 main references, and they are great tools to start with. Here I mainly handling NetCDF files, and I am only putting some useful quick notes (or short code piece) in case I need them.

NetCDF Guide (ongoing)

I have been dealing with NetCDF files extensively recently. This provides me a good opportunity of learning more about NCO and CDO. Also, Python has helped a lot before I figured out the NetCDF4 support in CDO. I am collecting all the useful information here, as my future reference.

Content

1.  Basic knowledge of NetCDF

2.  Creating a NetCDF file

3.  Reading, plotting

4.  Editing, editing

5.  Dealing with multiple files

Climate Data Operator (CDO) installation on Linux

CDO (Climate Data Operator) is a powerful tool for handling NetCDF files. It is also able to process other formats like HDF5, GRIB2, and so on. In my research (WRF) I only use NetCDF format, so here I install CDO only with NetCDF support.

1. Get the latest version of CDO

Go to the official website of CDO, and download whatever version is there. By the time I am writing this post, the newest version is 1.6.8.

$ wget code.zmaw.de/attachments/download/10030/cdo-1.6.8.tar.gz
$ tar -zxf cdo-1.6.8.tar.gz
$ cd cdo-1.6.8