There are now two diagnostics packages available. The first, and older, package
provides diagnostics of the climatological monthly means. The second package
provides some diagnostics of the variability.

Diagnostics of Variability

Dave Williamson's Draft of the WGNE Standard Diagnostics of Variability.

The variability package produces a limited number of plots on 6-hourly, daily,
and monthly timescales. The package produces a tar file of the html and image
files organized in a directory structure for easy viewing with the user's browser
application.

To use this package certain fields must be output by the model.
Note that 6-hourly and daily data are not output by default.
The following fields are required:
  • 6-Hourly: FLUT, U850, U200, OMEGA500, PRECT
  • Daily: U200, V200, PRECT
  • Monthly: the default fields are sufficient

    The following lines must be present in your namelist file in order
    to have the model output all of the necessary fields used by the
    variability package. If you are not already using fincl2 or fincl3,
    you may use these 'as is'. If you are, please concatenate these
    fincl2 and fincl3 lists onto your own.

    fincl2 = 'U200','V200','PRECT'
    fincl3 = 'FLUT','OMEGA500','PRECT','U200','U850'
    mfilt(3) = 40
    nhtfrq(3) = -6

    Plot Types Included

    6-Hourly Data
  • Wavenumber-frequency power spectra plots

    Daily Data

  • Hovmöller plots of 200 mb velocity potential
  • Madden-Julian Oscillation index plots
  • Precipitation rate histograms

    Monthly/Seasonal Data

  • Equatorial Pacific Hovmöller plots of anomalies
  • Timeseries of surface temperature anomalies
  • Timeseries of Niño 1&2, Niño 3, Niño 4 anomalies
  • Timeseries of precipitation anomalies
  • Timeseries of total cloud amount anomalies
  • Timeseries of sea-level pressure anomalies
  • EOFs of winter 500 mb geopotential height
  • Amplitude and phase of annual cycle

    Example plots of the webpages created by the variability diagnostics package.

    Get the Script or Code

    Users with NCAR accounts can download the c-shell script needed to
    run the package. Alternatively, DAVE and Dataproc users can copy the script
    /ccsm/atm/DIAG/var_code/variab.csh to their working directory, and CGD Linux
    and SUN users can copy /fs/cgd/data0/stevens/DIAG/var_code/variab.csh to their
    working directory. Then just execute the interactive script. The script will prompt
    you for the needed path names, etc.

    If you wish to install the package on your own system a tar file of the code
    and the comparison plots is available on my anonymous ftp website (~12MB).

    >ftp ftp.cgd.ucar.edu
    >login using "anonymous" and your email address
    >cd pub/stevens
    >binary
    >get amwg.variab.tar.gz

    Untar the file where you wish. You will only need to edit the script
    variab.csh to set the environment variable DIAG_HOME to point to the
    directory you just created. Please read the README file.

    Mark Stevens (stevens@ucar.edu)
    Climate and Global Dynamics Division
    National Center for Atmospheric Research