Using "grahics.pl"

After running WRF, copy your wrf output to the graphics directory

[home em_real]$ cp "wrfout_d01_2012-08-01_00:00:00" ../../../graphics

You may wish to create directories for all your WRF runs to keep track of both namelists and the wrfout files

[home em_real]$ cd ~/WRF/graphics

We need to change the namelist in namelist.pinterp to recognize the wrfout file we want to process

You may wish to create backups of the namelists otherwise the originals are still in the graphics tar file

[home graphics]$ vi namelist.pinterp

After input_name = paste your wrfout file name

save and exit, then run p_interp

./p_interp

it will create a wrfout file with a _PLEV at the end

Copy the file name and open wrfout.ctl

[home graphics]$ vi wrfout.ctl

paste the file name after dset ./ on the first line

save and exit

open graphics.pl to adjust the namelist, you will also need an open namelist.input handy from your WRFV3 directory

[home graphics]$ vi graphics.pl

Paste the file name from the interp program after my $wrfout

my $wrfout = wrfout......._PLEV;

the next edited line, $freq is how frequent the output is. 

This should be set to the hours that you have set in namelist.input next to the line history_interval, note that this value 
is in minutes

by default history_interval is set to 180 minutes and $freq = 3 hours

my $freq =3;

Next line is the duration of your data, you can find this value in your namelist.input after run hours
Default value is 12

my $duration=12;

Next line is year of your output

my $begyyyy=2000;

Next line is month of your output

my $begmon="jan";

Next line is day 1 of your output

my $begdd=01;

Next line is first hour of your output

my $beghh=00'

The next 9 lines require you to look at namelist.wps in your WPS directory

line1 should be 1 less than the value of e_we from namelist.wps

my $isize=73;

Line2 should be 1 less than the value of e_sn from namelist.wps

my $jsize=60;

The remainder of the lines are exactly as they were in your namelist.wps

Save and Exit

Run graphics by typing

graphics.pl

Choose a type of plot

If successful you will notice the 3 hour output .png image files in your images directory

[home graphics]$ cd images

To convert them to a gif movie you can type this code, playing with the dwell time will produce
a nicer movie than mine, I chose 70pcp for the Jan 2000 case

[home images]$ convert -delay 30 -loop 0 70* 70pcp.gif

download the movie and drag to your browser to play or open up in another viewer

Done