In section 10 we will take a break from the complexities of the dispersion model calculations, and review some different display options.  Let's start with scripting.  Every time when you run HYSPLIT, one of the HYSPLIT display programs, that is the display contour program through the graphical user interface, it will generate either a batch file or a LINUX script, a bash shell script, with the commands that were invoked when you did the concentration plot.  So for instance, if we were to go to the working directory, hysplit4/working, we would find this concplot.bat from the last time we invoked the contour display program from the graphical user interface, in this particular case it was exercise number nine.  Looking at this you can see that there are many different options available.  When you run the display program, the contour and display program, all these are command line options that we invoked, for instance the contour intervals.

If you were to run the concplot program without any arguments, you can do this through the command line, for instance, you open up a command line window and type in the name of the plotting program, concplot here, you will get a list of all the options that are available to you.  Not all of these options get set in the graphical user interface. 

But this, by doing this, it permits you to automate some graphics.  Once you've generated a graphic you like through the graphical user interface, you can then optimize it, and perhaps do multiple repetitions using different options.  So for example, if we wanted to do black and white instead of color, the k option would be zero instead of one, which is the default.  So to do that we could bring back the file and change k from 1 to 0.

Now to actually run this from Windows Explorer we need to tell the operating system to change directory to where the files are contained, which is hysplit4/working, that's where we'll find the binary file for instance.  Otherwise you would have to go to the working directory in the command line, and then execute the script from there.  But if we execute the batch file through Windows Explorer, it doesn't know that it's in this directory, it assumes it's in the root directory.  And we've created a new concplot now, which you can see is now black-and-white.

So this concludes this very short section on display scripting.