How to convert data for Geogrid

Back to the WRF-SFIRE user guide.

This wiki page explains how to transform geotiff files to geogrid using convert_geotiff script in wrfxpy.

Get Anaconda3 distribution

Download and install the Python 3 Anaconda Python distribution for your platform. We recommend an installation into the user's home directory.

wget https://repo.continuum.io/archive/Anaconda3-2019.10-Linux-x86_64.sh
chmod +x Anaconda3-2019.10-Linux-x86_64.sh
./Anaconda3-2019.10-Linux-x86_64.sh

Add your environment (~/.custom.csh) the following line

setenv PROJ_LIB "$HOME/anaconda3/share/proj"

or if you are using bash to ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc

export PROJ_LIB="$HOME/anaconda3/share/proj"

Install environment

Create a python environment for gdal compatibility. Shortly this is going to be the environment for wrfxpy installation.

conda create -n wrfxpy python=3 gdal netcdf4 pyproj paramiko dill scikit-learn h5py pandas psutil proj4
conda activate wrfxpy
conda install -c conda-forge simplekml pygrib f90nml pyhdf xmltodict basemap
pip install MesoPy python-cmr

Note that conda and pip are package managers available in the Anaconda Python distribution.

Get wrfxpy repository

Get repository wrfxpy and checkout to convert_geotiff branch. Shortly, it is going to be available in the master branch.

git clone https://github.com/openwfm/wrfxpy
git checkout convert_geotiff

Run convert_geotiff.sh

Run the code to generate geogrid from geotiff files. Run the following line for each variable to process.

./convert_geotiff.sh geotiff_file geo_data_path wrf_variable_name [bbox]

where:

• geotiff_file - path to a geotiff file to be converted to geogrid
• geo_data_path - any path where to save all the variables
• wrf_variable - WRF variable created on src/geo/var_wisdom.py
• bbox - optional, bounding box to sample the original geotiff file from, using WGS84 coordinates. Format: min_lon,max_lon,min_lat,max_lat

If you want to know more information and the existing options for wrf_variable, run ./convert_geotiff.sh without inputs

./convert_geotiff.sh

Some examples:

./convert_geotiff.sh ./elevation.tif geo_data ZSF
./convert_geotiff.sh ./fuel.tif geo_data NFUEL_CAT
./convert_geotiff.sh ./fuel.tif ./geo_data NFUEL_CAT -112.8115,-112.1661,39.4820,39.9750

Results from convert_geotiff.sh

The convert_geotiff.sh script will generate a folder specified by the user by geo_data_path with

• Variable folders: A folder for each variable previously run (ZSF and NFUEL_CAT folders) containing:
  • a geogrid file of the variable.
  • an index file of the variable.
• geogrid_tbl.json: A JSON file with all the geogrid information for each variable.
• GEOGRID.TBL: A text file with the information to add to GEOGRID.TBL (depends on src/geo/var_wisdom.py, so only copy what you need).
• index.json: A JSON file with index information for each variable.

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See the github repository for convert_geotiff for the latest documentation and source code.