This repository gathers scripts and notebooks used to generate various products related to the Island Climate Update (ICU).

The Island Climate Update is a monthly Regional Climate Outlook Forum and outlook bulletin for the southwest Pacific.

go to:

https://speakerdeck.com/nicolasf/icu-175

To view examples of some of these products incorportated in the presentation material uploaded on speakerdeck before the monthly ICU teleconference.

The scripts and notebooks are written in the language Python. They make heavy use of the Python scientific stack: i.e. in particular the following libraries:

• Numpy
• Scipy
• Pandas
• Matplotlib
• Basemap

To get all these working on your platform (Windows, Linux, Mac), I strongly recommend installing the Anaconda Python distribution, developed and made available for free by Continuum Analytics.

This github repository is organised in different sections:

1. mailing

generates the monthly mail sent to the ICU mailing list, with time of the teleconference translated in the different time-zones in the region.

usage example:

generates the mail for the issue 175 of the ICU, teleconference to be held on the 2nd of April 2015 at 12:30 PM (assumes NZ time)

2. Climate Maps

• TRMM Rainfall (Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission)

  there are two versions:

  • one makes use of the images directly available from the Nasa TRMM website, updated daily for the last 30 days averages and anomalies: the script downloads the image, crops it and overlay the image on a high resolution basemap of the southwest Pacific.

    • see plot_sp_30days_im_averages.ipynb for the last 30 days averages map

    • see plot_sp_30days_im_anoms.ipynb for the last 30 days anomalies map

  • The other is based on the actual data available from ftp://disc2.nascom.nasa.gov/data/TRMM/Gridded/Derived_Products/3B42RT/Daily/, the whole process is constructed around a couple of scripts and notebooks:

    • get_daily_TRMM.py downloads the TRMM data daily in binary and converts the files to NetCDF
    • make_ICU_TRMM_map.ipynb creates the map of averages or anomalies for the current month (if we are after the 25) or the previous month (before the 25th)

• Sea Surface Temperature (SST) anomalies from the NOAA OISST V2 dataset
  • see make_ICU_SST_map.ipynb

3. ENSO indices

• plot_real_time_indices.ipynb downloads the Southern Oscillation Index and NINO indices data from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) and makes the plots

• realtime_NIWA_SOI.ipynb: calculates the NIWA SOI according to the Troup method using the Tahiti and Darwin MSLP data made available via ftp by the BoM at ftp://ftp.bom.gov.au/anon/home/ncc/www/sco/soi/

4. TRMM-based Near realtime Monthly Regional Rainfall Estimates

The rainfall regional estimates for the ICU Island Groups are calculated from the TRMM daily dataset (updated daily, 2 days latency).

For each Island group, the monthly value is derived from the average of all grid-points (or "pixels") in the TRMM Dataset that are contained of intersect with a coastline, to ensure that the values correspond as closely as possible to rainfall on land, and excluding rainfall falling on ocean surfaces.

The climatology used has been established over the 2001 – 2012 period. The categories ("Well-below", "Below", etc.) are determined according to the percentage of the normal rainfall for that month.

The whole process relies on a suite of Python scripts and IPython notebooks, they will be uploaded here shortly