Description

The Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3) airborne field campaign used the High-Altitude Imaging Wind and Rain Airborne Profiler (HIWRAP) instrument to collect wind and precipitation measurements. This data recipe, provided by NASA’s Global Hydrometeorology Resource Center Distributed Active Archive Center (GHRC DAAC), enables users to generate a time-height plot of the measured HS3 HIWRAP radar reflectivity through a Python plotting routine. The Python routine requires users to define the GHRC OPeNDAP path to a data file and measured variable of interest. This data recipe then plots the data to provide a quick visualization of radar reflectivity. To run this Python routine, a pre-installed version of Python and additional Python packages are required. Advanced users may alter the code to plot other HS3 HIWRAP data variables.

Supporting Software Information

Once your NASA Earthdata account has been created, you can access the GHRC OPeNDAP for the HS3 HIWRAP data files categorized by year. Simply navigate to the desired year and day, then copy the name from the web page as shown below.

Step 4

Step 5

Within the “Set Parameters” portion of the code, there are two variables for defining the final plot font sizes.  To change the font size of the plot labels, you may alter the “pltlbl_size” variable in the area highlighted.

To change the font for the rest of the plot (e.g. axis font, color bar etc.) change the font size within the matplotlib parameters highlighted below.

Step 6

Within the data file, the time field is defined in hours since the beginning of a given flight on a given date.  For the data file used in this data recipe, the start time is 00:00 UTC on October 17, 2014. To make this information more readable, the next portion of the code reformats the time field so that the time is shown in standard UTC time on the final plot.  You do not need to make an alterations to this section.

Step 7

Once the time is formatted, the array of values containing the radar reflectivity in dBZ and associated time and range information is split in half to generate two separate panel plots.

Step 8

This data recipe also provided the option to manually change the font size of the color bar labels. To do this, comment out the existing cbar.set_label and cbar2.set label parameters highlighted.

Then, un-comment the two parameter lines provided as shown below.

Step 9

To create the final plot, simply run the code and the generated plot shown below should appear.

Please note that this Python script may be reused and altered to plot additional HIWRAP data variables.  This plot has not undergone any quality control measures, so additional alternations are needed for scientific use.

Dataset Information

Key Parameters