Command Line Interface

The global-forecast-validation package comes with a command line interface included in the installation. It can be used by activating the environment that global-forecast-validation was installed in and using the command gb_fcst_val. Seeing a list of all of the available commands in the command line interface simply requires the following command in the terminal:

gb_fcst_val -h

This will produce the following:

usage: gb_fcst_val [-h] {compress,validate,extract} ...

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit

Commands:
  {compress,validate,extract}
    compress            Takes 52 separate NetCDF forecast files and combines
                        them into one compact NetCDF file with only daily
                        values
    validate            Takes a directory of NetCDf files created with the
                        compress command and performs forecasts validation
                        with them. The results of the analysis are stored in a
                        csv. WARNING: The netcdf files must be consecutive
                        daily values, else the results will be wrong.
    extract             Extracts data from a folder with NetCDF forecast files
                        (generated with the compress_netcdf function) into CSV
                        files in the given path

To then see the arguments for a specific argument, simply type the following in the command line:

gb_fcst_val compress -h

Which then produces:

usage: gb_fcst_val compress [-h] folder_path out_folder file_name

positional arguments:
  folder_path  The path to the directory containing the forecast files
  out_folder   The path to the directory that you want the more compact NetCDF
               file in.
  file_name    The name of the region. For example, if the files followed the
               pattern of "Qout_africa_continental_1.nc, this argument would
               be "Qout_africa_continental"

optional arguments:
  -h, --help   show this help message and exit

After this, simply enter the required arguments (and optional arguments if desired) and the functions will run the same as if you used them in a python script.