weather-forecast-retrieval 0.6.13

Weather forecast retrieval gathers relevant gridded weather forecasts to ingest into physically based models for water supply forecasts

Weather Forecast Retrieval

Weather forecast retrieval gathers relevant gridded weather forecasts to ingest into physically based models for water supply forecasts

Current atmospheric models implemented:

• High Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR)
• Rapid Refresh (RAP)

Install

pip install weather-forecast-retrieval

System dependencies

nccopy

nccopy is used during the conversion in grib2nc. To install the netCDF-C libraries that are specific for your system. See the instructions from Unidata

wgrib2

To use the grib2nc command/function you will have to have wgrib2 installed on the host computer.

This is easiest done by following NOAA instructions. After completing their instructions, make wgrib2 accessible by cd into the source code and attempt to install it under your ~/bin with:

ln wgrib2/wgrib2 ~/bin/wgrib2

Docker

The retrieval aspect of weather_forecast_retieval has been built into a Docker image based on the Python 3 Alpine linux image. This allows for a docker deployment to run and retrieve HRRR data and convert to netcdf if needed. To use, first build the image

docker build -t usdaarsnwrc/weather_forecast_retieval .

Grab a coffee as this has to compile pandas from source (10+ minutes of compile time). Once completed, modify or create a new docker-compose.yml and modify the volume attachments as necessary. There are 2 volumes to attach, a data drive mounted to /data and the config file folders at /code/config. To setup the download, the config file is passed to docker-compose:

docker-compose run weather_forecast_retrieval /code/config/hrrr.ini

Command line usage

get_hrrr_archive

usage: get_hrrr_archive [-h] -s START_DATE -e END_DATE -o SAVE_DIR
                        [-f FORECASTS]

Command line tool for downloading HRRR grib files from the University of Utah

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -s START_DATE, --start START_DATE
                        Datetime to start, ie 2018-07-22 12:00
  -e END_DATE, --end END_DATE
                        Datetime to end, ie 2018-07-22 13:00
  -o SAVE_DIR, --output SAVE_DIR
                        Path to save the downloaded files to
  -f FORECASTS, --forecasts FORECASTS
                        Number of forecasts to get

The following command line will download data for a single hour and output into the ~/Downloads folder to the file ~/Downloads/hrrr.20180722/hrrr.t12z.wrfsfcf01.grib2:

get_hrrr_archive -s '2018-07-22 12:00' -e '2018-07-22 12:10' -o tests/RME/output/

convert_grib2nc

run_hrrr_retrieval