METplus Use Case: Track and Intensity TCMPR (Tropical Cyclone Matched Pair) Plotter
This is a wrapper to the MET plot_tcmpr.R, based on R-project Statistical package Rscript. This Rscript will be deprecated in a future METplus release.
Review: Take a look at the following settings.
The default image resolution for the plot_tcmpr.R Rscript is set to 300, for print quality, but quite large for display purposes. The following is an R config file that is passed to the Rscript and changes the default and reduces the image size. It is a simple one line file, but go and take a look.
The plot_tcmpr.R script knows to read this TCMPRPlotterConfig_Customize R config file since it is defined in the TCMPRPlotter.conf file.
Note: If you modify the TCMPR_PLOTTER_CONFIG_FILE variable and leave it undefined (not set), then no configuration file will be read by the R script and the default setting of img_res=300 will be used.
TCMPR_DATA - the path to the input data, in this example, we are using the data in the TC_PAIRS_DIR directory.
MODEL_DATA_DIR - path to the METplus input data.
TRACK_DATA_DIR - path to the METplus input data.
Optional, Refer to the TC-Stat tool example section of the MET Users Guide for a description of plot_tcmpr.R
If you wish, refer to the Format Information for TCMPR output line type table, for a tabular description of the TC-Pairs output TCST format. After running this Track and Intensity example, you can view the TC-Pairs TCST output files generate by this example under your ${METPLUS_TUTORIAL_DIR}/output/track_and_intensity/tc_pairs directory while comparing to the information in the table.
The tcmpr defaults are used for any conf settings left as, unset, For example as: XLAB =
The current settings in the conf files are ok and no changes are required. However, after running the exercise feel free to experiment with these settings.
The R script that Track and Intensity runs is located in the MET installation; share/met/Rscripts/plot_tcmpr.R. The usage statement with a short description of the options for plot_tcmpr.R can be obtained by typing:
with no additional arguments. The usage statement can be helpful when setting some of the option in METplus, below is a description of these settings.
- CONFIG_FILE is a plotting configuration file
- PREFIX is the output file name prefix.
- TITLE overrides the default plot title. Bug: CAN_NOT_HAVE_SPACES
- SUBTITLE overrides the default plot subtitle.
- XLAB overrides the default plot x-axis label.
- YLAB overrides the default plot y-axis label.
- XLIM is the min,max bounds for plotting the X-axis.
- YLIM is the min,max bounds for plotting the Y-axis.
- FILTER is a list of filtering options for the tc_stat tool.
- FILTERED_TCST_DATA_FILE is a tcst data file to be used instead of running the tc_stat tool.
- DEP_VARS is a comma-separated list of dependent variable columns to plot.
- SCATTER_X is a comma-separated list of x-axis variable columns to plot.
- SCATTER_Y is a comma-separated list of y-axis variable columns to plot.
- SKILL_REF is the identifier for the skill score reference.
- LEGEND is a comma-separted list of strings to be used in the legend.
- LEAD is a comma-separted list of lead times (h) to be plotted.
- RP_DIFF is a comma-separated list of thresholds to specify meaningful differences for the relative performance plot.
- DEMO_YR is the demo year
- HFIP_BASELINE is a string indicating whether to add the HFIP baseline and which version (no, 0, 5, 10 year goal)
- FOOTNOTE_FLAG to disable footnote (date).
- PLOT_CONFIG_OPTS to read model-specific plotting options from a configuration file.
- SAVE_DATA to save the filtered track data to a file instead of deleting it.
- PLOT_TYPES is a comma-separated list of plot types to create:
- BOXPLOT, POINT, MEAN, MEDIAN, RELPERF, RANK, SKILL_MN, SKILL_MD
- for this example, set to MEAN,MEDIAN to generate MEAN and MEDIAN plots.
- SERIES is the column whose unique values define the series on the plot, optionally followed by a comma-separated list of values, including:
ALL, OTHER, and colon-separated groups. - SERIES_CI is a list of true/false for confidence intervals. Optionally followed by a comma-separated list of values, including:
ALL, OTHER, and colon-separated groups.
Run METplus: Run Track and Intensity use case.
Examples: Run the track and intensity plotting script
Generates plots using the MET plot_tcmpr.R Rscript.
Example 1:
In this case, the TCMPRPlotter.conf file is configured to generate MEAN and MEDIAN plot types with TCMPR_PLOTTER_PLOT_TYPES.
Run the following command:
${METPLUS_BUILD_BASE}/parm/use_cases/met_tool_wrapper/TCMPRPlotter/TCMPRPlotter.conf \
${METPLUS_TUTORIAL_DIR}/tutorial.conf \
config.OUTPUT_BASE=${METPLUS_TUTORIAL_DIR}/output/track_and_intensity
The following directory lists the files generated from running these use cases:
AMAX_WIND-BMAX_WIND_boxplot.png
AMAX_WIND-BMAX_WIND_mean.png
AMAX_WIND-BMAX_WIND_median.png
AMSLP-BMSLP_mean.png
AMSLP-BMSLP_median.png
TK_ERR_mean.png
TK_ERR_median.png
Example 2:
Copy the TCMPRPlotter.conf file to the user_config directory:
${METPLUS_TUTORIAL_DIR}/user_config/TCMPRPlotter_boxplot.conf
Open the new conf file with an editor and change the list of plot types to only include BOXPLOT.
Change this line (around line 65):
to
Close the file and rerun METplus:
${METPLUS_TUTORIAL_DIR}/user_config/TCMPRPlotter_boxplot.conf \
${METPLUS_TUTORIAL_DIR}/tutorial.conf \
config.OUTPUT_BASE=${METPLUS_TUTORIAL_DIR}/output/track_and_intensity_boxplot
The following directory lists the additional files generated from running this use case:
AMAX_WIND-BMAX_WIND_boxplot.png
AMSLP-BMSLP_boxplot.log
AMSLP-BMSLP_boxplot.png
TK_ERR_boxplot.log
TK_ERR_boxplot.png
To view the png images generated by running these examples, use the display command.
cd to your OUTPUT_BASE/tcmpr_plots directory.
display AMAX_WIND-BMAX_WIND_mean.png &
display AMAX_WIND-BMAX_WIND_median.png &
display AMAX_WIND-BMAX_WIND_boxplot.png> &
