Error in Running WRF_Hydro_Regridding_Spatial_Weights.py – "PROJ: lcc: Invalid latitude"

[Fatemeh Shirkhanloo]

Dear WRF-Hydro Team,

I hope you are well.

I am currently running the WRF_Hydro_Regridding_Spatial_Weights.py  script in HPC Cluster to create spatialweights.nc file for my domain, and I received the following error:

RuntimeError: PROJ: lcc: Invalid latitude

I would appreciate it if you could help me to solve it.

Best Regards,
Fatemeh

[zed li]

Dear Fatemeh,

I hope this message finds you well.

I came across your post regarding the error you encountered while running the WRF_Hydro_Regridding_Spatial_Weights.py script:

RuntimeError: PROJ: lcc: Invalid latitude

I am currently facing the same issue and was wondering if you have managed to resolve it. If so, I would greatly appreciate any insights or guidance you could offer to help me address this error.

Thank you in advance for your time and assistance. Looking forward to your response.

Best regards,
Zed Li

[zed li]

Hi Fatemeh,

I hope this message finds you well.

The cause of the problem appears to be that the version of the GDAL library is too high (greater than 3.*). In GDAL versions 3.0 and above, the convention for representing coordinates changed from (longitude, latitude) to (latitude, longitude), which leads to the "Invalid latitude" error.

Best Regards,

zed li

在2025年7月30日星期三 UTC+8 11:58:18<Fatemeh Shirkhanloo> 写道：

[Kevin Sampson]

Fatemeh,

Do you have the projection information for your domain? The error indicates an invalid latitude, which usually means the latitude is outside the bounds (-90, 90). Can you check your domain coordinate system information and report back?

Kevin

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[Fatemeh Shirkhanloo]

Hi Zed, 

I hope you are well.

While running the WRF-Hydro ArcGIS regridding preprocessor script, I encountered the error "PROJ: lcc: Invalid latitude" when attempting to transform geographic coordinates using the Lambert Conformal Conic (LCC) projection. This was due to a change in axis order conventions introduced in GDAL 3.x and PROJ 6+, where EPSG:4326 (WGS84) now defaults to latitude–longitude order instead of the traditional GIS-friendly longitude–latitude. As a result, the script passed coordinates as (lon, lat), but PROJ interpreted the first value as latitude, leading to an out-of-range error. I resolved this by explicitly setting the axis mapping strategy to traditional GIS order using wgs84_proj.SetAxisMappingStrategy(osr.OAMS_TRADITIONAL_GIS_ORDER)  after importing EPSG:4326 in the script. This ensured the coordinates were correctly interpreted and allowed the projection transformation to proceed without errors. 

It is how I fixed the problem. 

Best regards,
Fatemeh

[Fatemeh Shirkhanloo]

Hi Kevin,

I hope you are well.

As I explained to Zed, this is how I fixed the problem: 

While running the WRF-Hydro ArcGIS regridding preprocessor script, I encountered the error "PROJ: lcc: Invalid latitude" when attempting to transform geographic coordinates using the Lambert Conformal Conic (LCC) projection. This was due to a change in axis order conventions introduced in GDAL 3.x and PROJ 6+, where EPSG:4326 (WGS84) now defaults to latitude–longitude order instead of the traditional GIS-friendly longitude–latitude. As a result, the script passed coordinates as (lon, lat), but PROJ interpreted the first value as latitude, leading to an out-of-range error. I resolved this by explicitly setting the axis mapping strategy to traditional GIS order using wgs84_proj.SetAxisMappingStrategy(osr.OAMS_TRADITIONAL_GIS_ORDER)  after importing EPSG:4326 in the script. This ensured the coordinates were correctly interpreted and allowed the projection transformation to proceed without errors. 

Best Regards, 
Fatemeh

[Kevin Sampson]

Fatemeh,

Thank you for the feedback and solution. I am familiar with this issue but had not encountered it in this script. I made the changes you proposed and will push it to the main WRF-Hydro GIS Pre-processing library after testing.

Cheers,

Kevin