Output for flight code

route.nc

The code produces a netCDF file called route.nc, where the header will look something like

netcdf route {
dimensions:
        lat_lon = 2 ;
        nSteps = 147 ;
variables:
        float timeTakenGC ;
                timeTakenGC:long_name = "Time taken for great circle route" ;
                timeTakenGC:units = "s" ;
        float timeTaken ;
                timeTaken:long_name = "Time taken to complete route" ;
                timeTaken:units = "s" ;
        float distanceGC ;
                distanceGC:long_name = "Distance to complete GC route" ;
                distanceGC:units = "km" ;
        float distance ;
                distance:long_name = "Distance to complete route" ;
                distance:units = "km" ;
        float initialTrackAngleGC ;
                initialTrackAngleGC:long_name = "Initial track angle for GC route" ;
                initialTrackAngleGC:units = "degrees" ;
        float initialTrackAngle ;
                initialTrackAngle:long_name = "Initial track angle" ;
                initialTrackAngle:units = "degrees" ;
        float origin(lat_lon) ;
                origin:long_name = "Origin as (lat,lon)" ;
                origin:units = "degrees" ;
        float destination(lat_lon) ;
                destination:long_name = "Destination as (lat,lon)" ;
                destination:units = "degrees" ;
        float route(nSteps, lat_lon) ;
                route:long_name = "Every step as (lat,lon)" ;
                route:units = "degrees" ;

// global attributes:
                :Angles = "All angles are measured anti-clockwise from East compass" ;

so (lat,lon) coordinates for the route and parameters to compare the route with the great circle route are provided.

Debugging code

When debugging the code it's useful to plot the routes calculated by the code, and they can be written to an ASCII file, routes.dat. The routes that get written to this file depend on the value of iRouteOutput in coreParamsMod.f90 which can be

• -1: file is not created
• 0: only great circle route and best route are written to file
• 1: all routes which reach destination
• 2: all routes which are calculated at the smallest step
• 3: all routes, including the fan across many angles with a larger step

There's some perl code for doing a quick and dirty visualisation of routes.dat at http://www.met.rdg.ac.uk/~marc/cgi-bin/extra/flightPath/path.cgi?dir=runDirectory, where runDirectory contains the nmldata files and the output files, e.g. http://www.met.rdg.ac.uk/~marc/cgi-bin/extra/flightPath/path.cgi?dir=/home/marc/f90/flightCode.