Meteograms

[Sestak, Dr. Michael]

If you are doing line plots as time series, you can use a fixed latitude and
longitude, but to display wind barbs as a time series, the plot has to be a
certain width or the barbs won't show up.  Which means that latitude is
usually set as a very small range instead of the single value you actually
want.  If that range is too wide for the resolution of the data you are
using, you will get multiple rows of wind barbs instead of just the one you
want.  I vaguely remember there was a message a while ago about a way to get
wind barb time series with fixed lat and lon (or maybe just that the quirk
that required the lat range had been fixed in a later version).  You'll have
to look for it in the message archive.  Apparently the meteogram.gs script
still uses the "old way" (as I do).

Michael Sestak
Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center
Monterey, CA


-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Alonso [mailto:malonso at MESO.COM]
Sent: Wednesday, August 17, 2005 10:18 AM
To: GRADSUSR at LIST.CINECA.IT
Subject: Meteograms


Hey folks,

I am working on making some meteograms with WRF output.  I have been
using the meteogram_gfs.gs script that was so graciously updated on put
on the ftp site.  I only wanted a couple variables so I removed a lot
of the script.  One of the portions of the plot that I wanted to keep
was the 10m wind speed and barb section.  I noticed that when I
initially used this script on some model data that it had several rows
of barbs in the 10m section when I was thinking it should only have
one.  This is probably a stupid question, but could someone please
explain why for the 10m winds there are multiple rows of barbs?  I mean
I see in the code that there is a range set for the latitude as opposed
to just one value.  But does anyone know how I can set it so that just
one row shows up.  Here is a link to my data, script and ctl file:

http://tornado.meso.com/grads_help/

I only took a very small subset of the data so that it would not take
forever for anyone who wishes to help me out to download the data.  The
code is pretty lengthy so I made it fairly obvious (rows and rows of
*s) where the snippet is that deals with the 10m winds.  If I use what
I marked in the code as Method 1 I get rows of barbs, if I use Method I
get nothing plotted even though setting gxout to print shows me that I
have non-flagged data in those variables.  Thanks in advance.

Matt