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What is FLEXTRA?

FLEXPART is a Lagrangian particle dispersion model developed and used by a scientific community. It can be driven by meteorological input data from a variety of global and regional models including ECMWF analyses and forecasts.

The home of the software is https://www.flexpart.eu/.

FLEXTRA is an atmospheric trajectory model used by a large user community. It can be driven by meteorological input data from a variety of global and regional models including ECMWF analyses and forecasts.

FLEXTRA can compute both forward and background trajectories using various trajectory types such as: three-dimensional, model level, mixing layer, isobaric and isentropic trajectories. Trajectory computations can be carried out in the three different modes. These are as follows:

  1. In NORMAL mode, a group of trajectories is specified starting from the same point but at different times. Several starting points (thus several groups of trajectories) can be defined for a single FLEXTRA run.
  2. In CET mode, trajectories are generated starting from the points of a user-defined uniform grid in a three-dimensional domain.
  3. In FLIGHT mode, both the starting location and starting time for each trajectory can be set individually. This mode is useful to calculate e.g. trajectories along the flight track of an aircraft.
 

FLEXTRA is a free software system released under the GNU General Public License V3.0. The joint homepage of FLEXTRA and FLEXPART (a Lagrangian particle dispersion model) is hosted by the Norwegian Institute for Air Research (NILU) and available at the following address:

http://transport.nilu.no/flexpart

This website contains a link to the latest available FLEXTRA documentation:

http://zardoz.nilu.no/~andreas/flextra/flextra3.html

Please note that FLEXTRA is not an ECMWF development. FLEXTRA is not distributed with Metview, but it has to be downloaded from the web site specified above and installed separately. It is installed at ECMWF though.

How to use FLEXTRA with Metview?

Metview provides a high level interface to prepare input data for FLEXTRA from ECMWF's MARS archive (via the FLEXTRA Prepare icon),

perform a FLEXTRA simulation (via the FLEXTRA Run icon)

and visualise the resulting output files using the FLEXTRA Visualiser icon. For the visualisation the gridded outputs in FLEXPART's custom binary format are converted to GRIB (click here for details).

Please note that the Metview interface was written for version 5.0 of FLEXTRA.

FLEXTRA at ECMWF

FLEXTRA is installed at ECMWF to be directly used from within Metview. You can find out more about it here.

FLEXTRA outside ECMWF

Details about setting up the Metview FLEXTRA interface outside ECMWF can be accessed here.

 

 

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