Component-based post-processing system

(1) Getting started

(2) Namelists

(3) Verification

(4) Input data

(5) New schemes

View results

Whenever COMPS is run, the resulting forecasts are writen to files in results/<runName>/. COMPS can write the forecasts in many formats, each of which is stored in a separate folder. For example, the tutorial run has been set up to output all forecasts into NetCDF files (stored in results/tutorial/netcdf/) and verification files (stored in results/tutorial/verif/).

COMPS produces one NetCDF file for each initialization date, configuration, and variable (in this case temperature). A directory listing of results/tutorial/netcdf/ should give something like:

20120101_0_T_clim.nc         20120107_0_T_clim.nc         20120113_0_T_clim.nc       
20120101_0_T_kf.nc           20120107_0_T_kf.nc           20120113_0_T_kf.nc         
20120101_0_T_persistence.nc  20120107_0_T_persistence.nc  20120113_0_T_persistence.nc
20120101_0_T_raw.nc          20120107_0_T_raw.nc          20120113_0_T_raw.nc        
20120102_0_T_clim.nc         20120108_0_T_clim.nc         20120114_0_T_clim.nc       
20120102_0_T_kf.nc           20120108_0_T_kf.nc           20120114_0_T_kf.nc         
...

The filename has the format: <initDate>_<initHour>_<variable>_<configuration>.nc

Plotting with `meteo`

COMPS has a tool called meteo that draws meteograms of forecasts. It works on any files that are in the NetCDF format (i.e any file in results/tutorial/netcdf/). The tool is found in the graphics/ directory.

To show a meteogram for the Kalman Filter forecast for the forecast initialized on 2012/01/01, run the following command in the top COMPS directory.

graphics/meteo results/tutorial/netcdf/20120101_0_T_kf.nc

The tool shows:

The forecast distribution over time
The observations
The ensemble members
The deterministic forecast

Here are sample forecasts for each of the 4 types of forecast. Note that your forecasts may look slightly different, because this synthetic dataset uses random numbers when creating forecasts and observations.

Raw forecast:

Kalman filtered forecast:

Climatology forecast:

Persistence forecast:

To see a list of command-line options that meteo supports, run meteo without any arguments.

Inspecting with `ncdump`

To see the raw values in the forecasts use the ncdump tool, which should be available if after installing NetCDF.

ncdump results/tutorial/netcdf/20120101_0_T_kf.nc | less

Tutorials