I've only really just descovered this site although you guys might (I know you do Deano from your previous posts) allready know of it. It's quite cool to find out what potential lifted indexes could be for the coming day, hence where thunderstorms are likely to form! I've seen satellite pics of Australia and seen the AVN lifted index charts for a particular day (nswstorms.com has these) and the thunderstorms formed right where the lifted index was lowest (-2 to -6), so I guess its good.
Just go to the link at bottom of this post and do the following:
1) Select you prefered Control file, I just normally leave it on its default setting where its selected the first one.
2) Select your Option, in this case I just use include variable definitions and units, wouldn't have a clue what the other one does?
3) Select your Plot type, I just use map, once again I wouldn't have a clue what the others do?
4) Click Next Page.
5) Select your Variable, In this case I'm / where going to use the very first one which is 4LFTX, there are many other variables you can look at.
6) Don't worry about Level for 4LFTX, other variables have different levels you can view though. Also don't worry about the extra operation 1 and 2, I wouldn't have a clue what they do either! Can someone enlighten me? It doesn't seem to be needed to be worried about for this anyway.
7) Now select a date and time etc. The dates are sort of current with ours and our days of the week. I just relised something else, even though it may say Wed (Wednesday) in the default title of the plot, depending on the time you may actually be in Thursday, this is I guess because the program is American based. Times are as follows:
....Z...............NZDT (NZ Daylight Savings Time, what were in now!)
00Z...............1.00pm
03Z...............4.00pm (These times here are one day)
06Z...............7.00pm
09Z.............10.00pm
12Z...............1.00am
15Z...............4.00am (These times here are the next day or morning /
18Z...............7.00am times previous to the day / times above)
21Z.............10.00am
(Times I hope are now correct! Thanks TonyT!) (Just in! explanation of dates I hope is now correct to!)
Now in Map Projection select Custom in the drop down menu, now follow along horizontally and in the four boxes type:163.......18......-48......15
That should bring up a nice map of New Zealand!
9) In the Draw dropdown menu select shaded & lines, don't worry about the Contour interval or white boxes. In the Plot size dropdown menu select 1024x800, that brings up a nice larger size map than the other plot sizes.
10) Type in a little title if you want to otherwise just leave it as it says for its default setting.
11) Now click Plot and see the result!
The reason I went through this big explanation is because it took me a while to use the dam thing! (calmly) so... I thought I'd put it up here so you know how to use it without trying to figure out how. But all you guys probably know how to use it allready, just thought I'd share this as I found this little forecasting program pretty cool!
Here's the link!:
http://wesley.wwb.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/pdisp_avn.sh
Enjoy!
Cheers
Aaron Wilkinson
