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With this icon we can recreate the layers of the ecCharts web-based visualisation system in the Metview environment. The icon retrieves and the data making up an ecCharts layer for the selected date from the MARS archive then applies the required post-processing steps and visualises it using one of the pre-defined ecCharts styles.

Execute: retrives the data from the MARS archive

Visualise:

What layers are available?

A fair number of eccharts layers are available.

The output of the icon

The output of the icons is not a single fieldset (Metviews storage type for GRIB data) but a list of these 4 elements:

1. the GRIB data (fieldset) retrieved from MARS.
   
2. a title definition (MTEXT icon)
   
3. a contouring icon s and a legend icon respectively.

This icon generates the gridded input data and the AVAILABLE file needed to run the FLEXPART Lagrangian dispersion model. The input forecast or analysis fields are either automatically retrieved from ECMWF's MARS archive or read from the specified input file. For help on editing icons, please see Editing Icons.

The macro language equivalent is flexpart_prepareeccharts().

What data is available?

Input data fields

The following is for information only - FLEXPART Prepare handles these details internally.

FLEXPART requires input fields on a regular latitude-longitude grid in GRIB format. The input data must contain five three-dimensional fields: the two horizontal wind components, vertical velocity, temperature and specific humidity. Additional surface fields (e.g. fluxes) are also needed. The three-dimensional input data has to be available on ECMWF model (i.e. η) levels defined by a hybrid vertical coordinate system. An important restriction is that all the data fields used within a FLEXPART run must have the same domain size, resolution, number of levels, etc.

All the required fields, with one exception, can be retrieved from ECMWF's MARS archive. The only exception is vertical velocity because FLEXPART needs the following field for its computations:

\dot \eta \frac{\partial \eta}{\partial p} 

Since only

\dot \eta

is archived in MARS the full product needs to be computed during the data preparation process (FLEXPART Prepare does it for you).

Input filenames

FLEXPART requires all the input GRIB files to be in the same folder using the following file naming convention: ENyymmddhh. The same directory has to contain the AVAILABLE file as well (it is automatically generated by FLEXPART Prepare).