A postprocessing tool for the cosmo community

A postprocessing tool for the COSMO community

• [e-mail] 10.9.2009

Motivation (1)

• Working at MeteoSwiss since 17 years ...

• Lesson learnt:

• Too much to be done, too few resources

• A lot of effort invested to develop and support tools (production, postprocessing, visualization, verification …)

• Often not possible or not desired to delegate development → resources lost for model improvement

• At least, do not re-invent the wheel!

Motivation (2)

• Every operational centre needs or uses a set of programs to process direct model output.

• MeteoSwiss is developing since 11 years a flexible and robust non-graphical processing tool, and has offered it to the COSMO community.

• It has been decided at the postprocessing workshop in Langen in March 2009 to use this tool as the official COSMO post-processing tool.

Identity card (1)

• Fortran program designed as a generic tool to manipulate NWP model data and gridded observations

• Simple data extraction & complex data operations are supported:

• merge surface temperature from IFS over sea and from COSMO over land to produce a single field suited for the assimilation cycle;
• interpolate Swiss radar composite onto the COSMO-2 grid for feeding the latent heat nudging process;
• compute stability indices like CAPE and CIN;
• compute the relative vorticity on pressure surfaces (approximation);
• compute EPS probabilities from COSMO-LEPS;
• compute neighbourhood probabilities from COSMO-7;
• create a single XML file with time serie of meteorological parameters from COSMO-2 / -7 / -EPS and IFS for a set of locations ;
• and much more ...

Identity card (2)

• Development started in May 1998, version 9.8 released in August 2009

• About 4 man-years already invested

• Resources allocated at MeteoSwiss for further development

• About 45k lines of Fortran 95

• Linked with DWD grib library and some COSMO modules

• Portable code (used on SGI Origin, IBM Power, Cray Opteron …)

• Documented code (examples, user manual, developer manual)

• Primary focus is the production environment

• high quality standard (both code and functionality!)
• robust handling of exceptions (> 1000 diagnosis messages)
• time criticality, memory footprint
• read model output once, produce as many products as desired

Program usage – Example

Program usage – Example

Program usage – Example

Program usage – Example

Program usage – Example

Program usage – Example

Program usage – Example

Build-in support for local usage

• Support for local definition of GRIB fields

• Encapsulated in an external resource file

• Support for local implementation of product specific post-processing

• Encapsulated in a site specific module

• Support for local implementation of product specific output

• Encapsulated in a site specific module

• Easy implementation of new coordinate systems

• Easy implementation of operator to compute new derived fields

Distribution package

• Tar file on COSMO web site

• Source code (fieldextra, grib library)
• Makefile (also for GNU fortran compiler)
• Resources (GRIB dictionary, location list, ...)
• Documentation (FirstContact.pdf, README.install, README.user, README.developer, HISTORY)
• Examples (also used to validate installation)

• Availability

• 10.2009: Version 10.0 (first supported version for external distribution)
• Soon: Version 9.8 (if you are very impatient to try...)

• Support

• Mailing list WG6 (or new mailing list?)

Roadmap (1)

• 10.2009 – Version 10.0

• Consolidated documentation
• Consolidated distribution package

• 02.2010 – Version 10.5

• Consolidated usage outside of MeteoSwiss
• GRIB2 support (with GRIB API)
• GME support on lat/lon grid

• 09.2010 – Version 11.0

• Consolidated interface with COSMO code
• NetCDF support
• SRNWP interoperability (support more grids, consolidated re-gridding,...)

Roadmap (2)

• Consolidated usage (v10.5, 02.2010)

• support for initial installation at different centres, bug fixes
• expend detection of field type
• site specific version of product specific output and postprocessing
• collect local resources (makefile, mesh, location)
• collect feedback, envisage solutions
• evaluate how to share development effort

• Organize a workshop in 2010 after the COSMO User Seminar ?

New priority task: postprocessing tool

• Goal Consolidate the MeteoSwiss tool ‘fieldextra’ to make it suitable for a usage by the whole COSMO community. Consolidate and extend COSMO utility modules to provide access to common functionalities and to offer a clean interface for fieldextra.

• Resources 0.825 FTE / 09.2009 – 09.2010