Introduction

pflexible is an open source Python package to work with Lagrangian Particle Disperion Model output. Currently it is built for FLEXPART but future versions will include greater generality.

Contributions and collaboration are welcome. The code is hosted at bitbucket and the documentation is hosted at readthedocs. pflexible is licensed under Creative Commons.

Current development activities are focused on improved generality and handling of FLEXPART output in all possible run configurations, with and without deposition, forward, backward, or otherwise.

Getting pflexible

Please contact: John F. Burkhart

First, make sure you also have the dependencies installed:

• numpy
• matplotlib
• basemap (matplotlib toolkit)
• f2py (to build FortFlex)
• netCDF4 (not python-netcdf)
• PIL

Note the easiest way I’ve found to deal with the dependencies is to use one of ‘complete distributions’ such as Enthought or the python(xy) or ideally Anaconda. For Ubuntu you can pretty easily just install the required packages. For the netcdf, we found it easiest to use the science-meteorology-dev meta package and use pip to install netcdf4-python.

Once you’ve installed all the dependencies, you can get the code from either sources below.

BitBucket

The code is available to the public at bitbucket.

PyPi

The pflexible code is also posted to pypi, but this is more likely to fall out of date.

---

Mailing List

There is a mailing list for the project set up at with sourceforge. You can subscribe to the pflexible list for user discussions.

Installation and setting the PYTHONPATH

If all is working correctly, and you have all the required dependencies, the it should simply be a matter of running setup.py:

python setup.py install

Depending on where you checked out the pflexible module to, you need to make sure it is accessbile in your PYTHONPATH environment variable. The dependencies also need to be available in the paths defined here.

Note

This can be accomplished after you’ve checked out the software::

%export PYTHONPATH=/path/to/pflexible

Python at NILU

Setting paths for most dependencies can be accomplished with:

%export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/xnilu_wrk/jfb/hg

And hopefully everything works!.

---

Building FortFlex

FortFlex is a Fortran module that allows highly efficient reading of the raw FLEXPART output. Building FortFlex is simple, and required only running a script within the f2py_build directory of the pflexible distribution:

cd f2py_build
chmod +x build_FortFlex.sh
./build_FortFlex.sh

Assuming you have all dependencies for f2py (gfortran, etc.) this will build and copy a new module into pflexible package called FortFlex.so that will automatically be used by the pf.read_grid routines.

If you have built the FortFlex.so module independently, be sure to copy it into the same directory as pflexible.py or somewhere on your PYTHONPATH. NOTE I am trying to replace this dependency (or at least make more builds available, if you have suggestions, please contact me).