The Dark Forest

for discussing pavalawrf

check out the website here: https://paladinofstorms.net/amc/ (under construction)

updated the coastline shapefiles



all future plots will now display coastlines representative of revision 251 (from 2022-02-04)

the current run (the "september run") will continue to use land/elevation data from (afaik) revision 225 (from 2019-12-04)

if you want to take a look at the shapefiles:

got mpas to compile and run properly finally

and figured out a way to plot contours directly using the hexagonal grid (with matplotlib's tricontour) so that it doesn't have to be converted (lossily) to a lat-lon rectangular grid first



now i can start to convert the wrf plotting scripts to use mpas output! though i'm not exactly sure how i'm gonna do winds (where do the wind barbs go?)

for those not up to speed on the current pavala weather/climate simulation situation, we are investigating using mpas instead of wrf because:

1 it's meant for global-scale simulations (wrf is first and foremost a regional model, though it does have an unsupported global setup that it can be run in)
2 wrf was having issues near the poles and i was unable to get much past a week in the "september run" test simulation, probably due to not being meant to run as a global model and the weird "rectangular" grid shapes you get near the poles (very short cell x widths)

but unfortunately this means basically starting over from scratch and rewriting all of my scripts that i had set up already

mpasvala 2026!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i think this is the 2nd or 3rd time i've installed mpas (i installed it last year, just picking up where i left off after yet another reset) but anyway we've scrapped the idea of using the native cells at least for most of the graphics there's kinda no point and it makes everything more difficult, so most of the graphics will be converted to a lat-lon grid... perhaps the olr (infrared cloud map) will remain in hexagonal cellular form since it does not need to be contoured or otherwise display any data but filled cell color

today i wrote a script for converting basic colorbars to smooth gradients, now i can create colorbars in text format and load them into the graphics scripts rather than hardcoding them into the individual files and typing out each color! (historically we made do with a limited number of colors per bar most of the time, but now we can have super detailed gradients, check it out!!!)



next steps:
- expand the graphics suite with more types of graphics (temp, dew point, precip, upper air stuff)
- create a git repository to make sure everything is backed up!
- simulate with a 60 km (~half degree) or maybe even 30 km grid mesh (~quarter degree! about 1/3 the number of cells in the tropical mesh we want to use in the real deal)
- maybe test with september 2020 data (what the most recent pavalawrf used)

quick overview of happenings since the last post:

toward the end of april and through what little available time i had in may i was able to put together the majority of the new graphics suite, with the exception of the 850 hPa theta-e plot (which is kind of a new addition? i have a script i made for wrf, but it was never set up for online use so you won't find it in the old wrf graphics on my website)

while recovering from the europe trip and jumping straight back into working 6 days in a row basically we also ran the model out through through september 2nd (the run i've been working with starts with august 2nd), effectively completing the "august run". this was done with the 48 km uniform mesh so halfway decent resolution (~0.4 deg) compared to the first tests. this allowed me to make more zoomed in sector graphics (though the placement of temperature samples & wind barbs have not really been adapted for this yet). i had to stop and restart the model (from where it left off) a few times, and this limits the data i have but for the final 3 days of the sim the run time was 33550 seconds or about 9.3 hours. that's a rate of about 7.75 simulation days per real day! not too bad

finally, during my current break i have set up the scripts for bulk graphics generation via shell script and uploading to a rudimentary viewer my website (you know the one, if you've looked at the pavalawrf stuff before)

little of what i've described in this post is new technology, most of it has just been porting over scripts that were used for wrf adapted to the current mpas setup. that being said, i hereby present the new, but not very improved mpas model graphics page! check it out here: https://paladinofstorms.net/amc/plots.html it replaces the old link on the main amc page - those graphics can still be accessed via the wrf model runs page on tropicalcyclonedata.net

it's still a work in progress but you can see (at the time of this writing) the first ~15 days of the sim for every plot type except 850 hPa theta-e for the three northern hemisphere sectors. i'm going to need to figure out how to make a better viewer for when there's like a year of mpasvala graphics to look through... but that's a bit down the road still

also the graphics are sloppy and need some work, but anyway

here's hurricane debby in the northwest sector:



and a novel wpac storm in the northeast!!! (there are more in the sim!)



next steps:
- porting over the plasim (!!!) tc tracking algorithm to do some analysis
- back scripts up to github!
- figure out the graph partitioning for the 60-15 km tropical refinement mesh and do a comparison august run with that mesh
- begin to reland?

spent a lot of time over the last two days trying to get the plasim low/tc tracking algorithm (which tries to track every low and then decide if it's a tc or not) working but it has a lot of problems and i've remembered that i'm going to be personally investigating each tc that comes up in the sim, like... i'm playing with pavala, that's what this is, this isn't my capstone or some scientific paper. so, i think i'm going to revert to the setup i had going with wrf where i had a basic probing script that showed all the lows in the tropics and tried to guess if they were tropical cyclones or not. but that's all it was, it was an overview with data i could use to interrogate myself whether or not a low was worth investigating. if it was, i could then use a tracker that followed a single cyclone to record its path and intensity. i think that method will end up working out a lot better, because then i don't have a bunch of junk lows to sort through and if terrain noise ends up messing with the tracker i can make it a bit more robust by implementing some sort of 850 hPa vorticity following system or something like hwrf/hafs use. additionally, i can add some cyclone phase calculations for use as a guide with assessing the storms' nature myself.

so i think that's gonna be the next thing i work on

also i noticed the temp and dew point graphics were coming from the 240 km run so i regenerated those



much better