MPAS | NCL High-resolution coastlines

NCL

High-resolution coastlines

One way to get high-resolution coastlines in your NCL maps is by downloading and installing the multi-resolution coastline database RANGS (Regionally Accessible Nested Global Shorelines), developed by Rainer Feistel from Wessel and Smith's GSHHS (Global Self-consistent Hierarchical High-resolution Shoreline) database. Note: do not use the high-resolution database for global data, as you will get streaks across your plot. This database is intended only for regional data.

NCL also supports shapefiles, if you need to add map outlines that NCL doesn't have.

To use this database, you must first download it from:

• https://www.io-warnemuende.de/rangs-en.html

On this page you should see a table with ten *.zip files to download:

rangs(0).zip     gshhs(0).zip
rangs(1).zip     gshhs(1).zip
rangs(2).zip     gshhs(2).zip
rangs(3).zip     gshhs(3).zip
rangs(4).zip     gshhs(4).zip

You must download all ten of these files, unzip them, and either put them in the directory

$NCARG_ROOT/lib/ncarg/database/rangs

like micromamba/envs/venv/lib/ncarg/database/rangs/

(which NCL will look in by default), or put them somewhere else and set the environment variable NCARG_RANGS to this directory. The files take up about 140 megabytes, unzipped.

xxx/micromamba/envs/venv/lib/ncarg/database/rangs
$ ls
'gshhs(0).rim'  'gshhs(2).rim'  'gshhs(4).rim'  'rangs(0).zip'  'rangs(2).cat'  'rangs(3).cel'  'rangs(4).zip'
'gshhs(0).zip'  'gshhs(2).zip'  'gshhs(4).zip'  'rangs(1).cat'  'rangs(2).cel'  'rangs(3).zip'
'gshhs(1).rim'  'gshhs(3).rim'  'rangs(0).cat'  'rangs(1).cel'  'rangs(2).zip'  'rangs(4).cat'
'gshhs(1).zip'  'gshhs(3).zip'  'rangs(0).cel'  'rangs(1).zip'  'rangs(3).cat'  'rangs(4).cel'