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)