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Try the following if you have time.
Add another location marker
Washington DC is quite close, at coordinates 38.5N, 77W. Create another Input Visualiser icon (or make a copy of the New York one) and set these co-ordinates. Create another Symbol Plotting icon to plot this marker in green and ensure it has a correct name in its legend entry. Drop the two icons into your existing plot.
Using the cursor data to examine the grid point values
Activate the Cursor Data tool and see what it shows you when you have multiple data layers in your plot. Note that both sets of data are scaled from their units in the GRIB files.
Experiment with different
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contouring schemes
The precipitation could of course be shaded differently - try some different colour schemes.
Experiment with different backgrounds and projections
Modify the Coastlines icon, for example:
- plot the US state boundaries
- try different land or sea shading colours
- change the frequency of the grid lines
Try a different Geographical View icon and set the projection to, for example, Mollweide. Drop this into the plot, then update the macro to use this new view (to do this, edit the macro, then drop your view icon into the editor towards the bottom of the code, where the view is defined; a little editing will be required to use your new view instead of the original oneBy setting Contour Min Level to 5, you can choose to quickly show only those areas with 5mm or more precipitation (look at a global map to see all of these areas).
Ensuring the title has the correct date and time
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- this procedure will be covered in Customising Your Plot Title
- if you have a fieldset variable called
msl_grib, the following line will extract the date at which the field is valid:msl_date = valid_date(msl_grib)
- use the
string()function to construct a date string similar to the one used in the current title- see String Functions for details of how to use it
- insert this into the
mtext()function instead of the current title (ensure that we read the msl data and extract its date before defining the title) - it is now more robust - if you use data from a different date or time, the title will still be correct
- note that this method will not work directly if you want to generate an animation from different time steps of data
Experiment with different backgrounds and projections
Modify the Coastlines icon, for example:
- plot the US state boundaries
- try different land or sea shading colours
- change the frequency of the grid lines
Try a different Geographical View icon and set the projection to, for example, Mollweide. Drop this into the plot, then update the macro to use this new view (to do this, edit the macro, then drop your view icon into the editor towards the bottom of the code, where the view is defined; a little editing will be required to use your new view instead of the original one).