FY 1984

METLIB-II—A program library for calculating and plotting atmospheric and oceanic fields

Macklin, S.A., R.L. Brown, J. Gray, and R.W. Lindsay

NOAA Tech. Memo. ERL PMEL-54, NTIS: PB84-205434, 53 pp (1984)

METLIB-II is a FORTRAN program library for deriving time series of geostrophic, gradient, or surface winds from sea level pressure (SLP) and ancillary fields gridded on a polar stereographic projection. Such fields are generated at the National Meteorological Center (NMC) and at Fleet Numerical Oceanography Center (FNOC); they can also be generated by digitizing SLP charts analyzed manually. The library also contains programs for contouring scalars, such as SLP, air temperature, or wind speed, and for plotting wind vectors on a map background. Plotting is based upon the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) graphics routines. A major advantage of the library is that spherical geometric calculations involving polar stereographic grids are internal to the programs. The relationship between geostrophic or gradient wind and surface wind can be assigned from speed reduction and turning angle constants or by a baroclinic, stability-dependent, single point boundary layer model. METLIB-II differs from METLIB in that the software was revised to increase efficiency of calculation. Internally, names of programs, functions, and subroutines were changed to give a clear indication of their purpose; documentation was revised and increased to give the user an exact explanation of each step in the software. The user is able to specify more input conditions and request more output variables, such as heat flux, vapor flux, momentum flux, etc. Some boundary layer solution subroutines were extensively modified.