Purpose: This is intended as a quick review and reinforcement of running the FLEXPART system.
These exercises utilise data and programs that have been pre-packaged for this course. In the following,
<path to course>
refers to the path
/home/kurs/donmor/CourseFiles/
In this exercise, you should repeat Lab 4, but this time simply choose a different area to model. This will involve the following three primary steps
Find a region in which there is some fire data. You can either
use the FIRMS web mapper and then download or point to the current file for that region when you instantiate FIRMS.py
Create your own fake datafile by modifying a copy of one of the FIRMS data files I have already downloaded for you in <path to course>/LabExerciseData/FIRMS/ - you would only need to modify a lat/lon and FRP for a couple of entries, so that they fall into your region of interest
Set up the new bounding box in your RunFlex.py to ingest the data (you might try to test this first at the bottom of FIRMS.py)
Create a new OUTGRID file in your <path to your working directory>/flexpartTemplates so that it covers your new region of interest
Run RunFlex.py and verify output with the quickFLEXVis.py
If you find that you need more of a challenge, I recommend you find a region of interest, then download current GFS and FIRMS data, extract the emissions and change the OUTGRID as described above, and run a current, real-time simulation.
A quick script for downloading GFS data is available at
<path to course>/WorkingSystem/getGFS1p0.py
Inside the file you will need to specify a storage directory in your $HOME filesystem, and a start time. The NCEP server tends to store forecast files back 18-24 hours, so make sure you choose a start time that is on the server (the 00Z forecast tends to show up by 03Z to 04Z). You should check, and change as necessary, the following variables in the program
MY_EMAIL_ADDR - this is what will be used for your anonymous ftp password. Please use your own email.
START_TIME - again, you will need to make sure you choose a current one, that's available on the server at the time
NUM_FORECAST_HOURS
STORAGE_DIR_ROOT - this directory should already exist in your $HOME filesystem
WGET - make sure this is the correct path on the system that you're using.