Numerical Weather Prediction Tutorial

Preparation

Participants must bring their own laptop computers and should be comfortable using the Linux command line! System requirements: at least 10GB free disk space, >4GB memory.

Please have Virtualbox installed (available for all platforms, see VirtualBox Homepage) and download the virtual machine file provided here (see below, user: wrf, password: wrf - created and tested using VirtualBox version 5.0.24) or prepare your own virtual machine.

Virtual machine setup

Download a lubuntu 16.04.1 32-bit image from lubuntu downloads. While other versions/distributions might work, I cannot provide any support if you use a different ISO! In particular 64-bit images might be problematic as there are probabily some compilation tweaks necessary.

Use this ISO to boot into a virtual machine with at least 2 cores, 4GB RAM and a 20GB hard drive (dynamic size).

  • username “wrf” (just to be consistent with the prepared configuration)
  • install packages: sudo apt install virtualbox-guest-dkms virtualbox-guest-utils virtualbox-guest-x11 csh ksh gfortran make m4 libjasper-dev libpng12-dev zlib1g-dev openmpi-bin libopenmpi-dev gdal-bin
  • if you would like to use QGis for displaying the final result: sudo apt install qgis (requires a graphical user interface)
  • download the file packages_data.tar.bz2 (see below) into /home/wrf and untar it there > cd ; tar -xf packages_data.tar.bz2 (this contains all the data files required to follow the tutorial - you can delete packages_data.tar.bz2 now)

Downloads

Slides (PDF) - Slides (md)

If you prepare your own VM, you only need to download packages_data.tar.bz2 (~431MB, SHA256: 66ab3855e5fef10036b3de1c37661410118b5926ca48a13d395e84ffa0601878).

If you prefer to use the prepared VM, you only need to download wrftut-2016.tar.bz2 (~2GB, SHA256: 5502007ab8a8b47ad81f12032447de21934d08fcabf9c4274c458f85fe215d16, a complete VirtualBox image, user: wrf, password: wrf).

Google drive folder containing both files.

Direct links (no Google drive):

The packages contain the following software/data (all freely available, some of the packages have been patched to include bug fixes and additional scripts for the tutorial):

Questions?

-> e-mail: tecer (at) hacknology.de or jabber: tecer (at) jabber.square-wave.de