Writing Static Data to Geogrid

[thodgdon818]

I was a participant at the WRF Basic tutorial this past July and I am beginning my first foray into the world of WRF. One thing I have been running into issues with is writing new static data fields into the Geogrid binary format. I am following the documentation provided online which recommends using the write_geogrid.c file. However, since I am so new to using WRF (and C) I don’t have a great understanding of how to effectively use this program. The file I am trying to convert is a GeoTiff generated using ArcGIS. Any guidance you can provide with converting the Geotiff into the required Geogrid format would be extremely helpful.

 

[mgduda]

If the dataset is in GeoTIFF format, a simpler option might be to use GDAL's gdal_translate tool (https://gdal.org/) to convert from GeoTIFF directly to the binary raster format used by the geogrid program. Assuming your GeoTIFF file is named "foo.tif", a command like the following should work after you've installed the GDAL tools:

gdal_translate -of foo.tif temporary.dat

The gdal_translate tool should print out two numbers that give the number of columns and the number of rows in the dataset; you can then use those two numbers to rename the "temporary.dat" file using the naming scheme expected by geogrid, e.g.,

mv temporary.dat 00001-NCOLS.00001-NROWS

where NCOLS and NROWS are the numbers provided by gdal translate, written as zero-padded five-digit integers.

 

[thodgdon818]

Thanks for the reply. When I try and run that command I get and error that says "FAILURE: No target dataset specified". Is this due to the -of flag? If I remove it the .dat file is created, but is that the correct binary raster format?

 

[mgduda]

Sorry about that -- I left of part of the gdal_translate command, which should read:

gdal_translate -of ENVI foo.tif temporary.dat

 

[thodgdon818]

Thanks, that seemed to work! I appreciate your help with this!