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Meteorological input
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It is possible to provide to the CIF ready-made METEO.nc files for CHIMERE to use, which have been generated with pre-processors, particularly those developped for PYVAR.
Note that they require the definition files COORD_DOM and VCOORD_NumberOfLevels_Psurf_Ptop:
consistency must be maintained when providing the CIF with all these files. 
They must be named METEO.YYYYMMDDHH.PP.nc
with YYYYMMDDHH the date in year-month-day and hour of the first hour provided in the file,
PP being the number of hours covered by the file.

The CIF is also able to run in a mode dedicated to generate METEO.nc files for CHIMERE as :doc:`explained here</usertutos/chimere_tutos/meteo>`

The format of the METEO.nc is as follows, with PP, NZONAL, NMERID and NVERTI given the relevant values:

.. literalinclude:: dump_meteo.txt
     :language: text

Important points:
  - the actual length of record is PP+1 since one hour more than the covered period is required for time interpolation within the last simulation hour.
  - if you do not use deep convection from the meteo data, you do not need variables dpdd, dpdu, dped and dpeu (saves space).
  - the dates are written in a fixed format on 19 characters (DateStrLen): YYYY-MM-DD_HH:mm:ss.