Bugfix: Investigate intermittent results from unit_plot_tc.xml unit test

[JohnHalleyGotway]

Describe the Problem

The call to the plot_tcmpr.R Rscript in unit_plot_tc.xml produces inconsistent results when run via the MET nightly build. For NB20230620 and NB20230621, differences were flagged in two images:

test_output/plot_tc/ABS_AMAX_WIND-BMAX_WIND_boxplot.png
test_output/plot_tc/TK_ERR_boxplot.png

NB20230620 produced the expected result in MET-develop whereas NB20230621 produced the expected result in MET-develop-ref. So the behavior is intermittent.

Expected Behavior

The expected results are on the left while the unexpected results are on the right:

To Reproduce

To start, recommend updating unit_plot_tc.xml by adding the -save_data option for plot_tcmpr.R. That will save off the data that was used for plotting to a file which may provide more clues if/when this unexpected behavior occurs in the nightly build.

This should be added to both the develop and develop-ref branches.

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[JohnHalleyGotway]

The nightly build run on seneca for NB20230622 did NOT flag any differences after I added the -save_data option for both the develop and develop-ref branches. Will close this issue for now since this transient behavior did not reoccur today. But if/when it does reoccur, recommend reopening this issue to debug further.