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 Python 3.8. This allows for a docker deployment to run and retrieve HRRR data. The docker image can call any of the command line programs in weather_forecast_retrieval.

For example, to run hrrr_nomads with docker:

docker run --rm usdaarsnwrs/weather_forecast_retrieval hrrr_nomads -l 3 -f 0,1,2 --bbox="-119,-118,37,38" -o /path/to/output -p /path/to/crop/output

The paths to the output directories are internal to the docker image and the necessary volume mounts are needed.

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/

hrrr_preprocessor

Use hrrr_preprocessor to make smaller files from a larger HRRR file. This will crop to a bounding box and extract the following variables:

• air temperature 2m (TMP:2 m)
• relative_humidity 2m (RH:2 m)
• wind_u 10m (UGRD:10 m)
• wind_v 10m (VGRD:10 m)
• precip_int surface (APCP: surface)
• short_wave surface (DSWRF: surface)
• elevation (HGT:surface)
• TCDC for entire atmosphere (for WindNinja)

usage: hrrr_preprocessor [-h] -o OUTPUT_DIR -s START_DATE -e END_DATE -f
                         FORECAST_HR --bbox BBOX [--verbose]
                         hrrr_dir

Crop HRRR files by a bounding box and extract only the necessary surface variables for running with AWSM. 

Example command:
$ hrrr_preprocessor -s '2019-10-01 00:00' -e '2019-10-01 02:00' -f 0 --bbox="-119,-118,37,38" -o /path/to/output --verbose /path/to/hrrr

positional arguments:
  hrrr_dir              Directory of HRRR files to use as input

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -o OUTPUT_DIR, --output_dir OUTPUT_DIR
                        Directory to write cropped HRRR files to
  -s START_DATE, --start START_DATE
                        Start date
  -e END_DATE, --end END_DATE
                        End date
  -f FORECAST_HR, --forecast_hr FORECAST_HR
                        Forecast hour
  -n NCPU, --ncpu NCPU  Number of CPUs for wgrib2, 0 (default) will use all
                        available
  --bbox BBOX           Bounding box as delimited string --bbox='longitude
                        left, longitude right, latitude bottom, latitude top'
  --verbose             increase logging verbosity

hrrr_nomads

The hrrr_nomads command line will download HRRR grib2 files from NOMADS. hrrr_nomads will fetch either the latest 3 hours of files or files between a start and end date. Optionally, specify the forecast hours to limit how many files are downloaded. If a bounding box and additional preprocess path is specified, hrrr_nomads will crop the files to the variables needed for running AWSM.

NOTE: Requires wgrib2 to be installed if cropping to a bounding box.

Example to download the latest 3 hours of data for files not found in the output directory, with the 00, 01 and 02 forecast hours, crop to a bounding box:

hrrr_nomads -l 3 -f 0,1,2 --bbox="-119,-118,37,38" -o /path/to/output -p /path/to/crop/output

Usage:

usage: hrrr_nomads [-h] -o OUTPUT_DIR [-n NUM_REQUESTS] [-s START_DATE]
                   [-e END_DATE] [-l LATEST] [-f FORECAST_HRS] [--bbox BBOX]
                   [-p OUTPUT_PATH] [--verbose] [--overwrite]

Download from NOMADS and/or crop HRRR files by a bounding box and extract only
the necessary surface variables for running with AWSM.

Example command to download the latest 3 hours and crop to a bounding box:
$ hrrr_nomads -f 0 --bbox="-119,-118,37,38" -o /path/to/output -p /path/to/crop/output --verbose

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -o OUTPUT_DIR, --output_dir OUTPUT_DIR
                        Directory to download HRRR files to
  -n NUM_REQUESTS, --num_requests NUM_REQUESTS
                        Number of concurrent requests, default 2
  -s START_DATE, --start START_DATE
                        Start date
  -e END_DATE, --end END_DATE
                        End date
  -l LATEST, --latest LATEST
                        Latest number of hours to download, defaults 3 hours
  -f FORECAST_HRS, --forecast_hrs FORECAST_HRS
                        Forecast hours, comma seperated list
  --bbox BBOX           Bounding box as delimited string --bbox='longitude
                        left, longitude right, latitude bottom, latitude top'
  -p OUTPUT_PATH, --preprocess_path OUTPUT_PATH
                        Directory to write preprocessed HRRR files
  --verbose             increase logging verbosity
  --overwrite           Download and overwrite existing HRRR files