Quick Start for Users
Even before WW4 is a mature wave model, you can download the present code from GitHub, by making your own local clone from the repository.
git clone https://github.com/NOAA-EMC/WW4
Once there is a stable public release, and you are interested in using rather than developing the model, we recommend that you clone the most recent public release.
git clone -b <version> https://github.com/NOAA-EMC/WW4
Where <version> is the version number of the public release. Previous versions of WAVEWATCH provided an installation option using a single tar file. At this time we are not sure if we will provide that service for WW4, as we consider the tar distribution to be outdate technology.
We intend to lean heavily on well-supported community libraries for WW4, moving away from more traditional locally supported libraries from operational centers. Under consideration are Kokkos, NetCDF, GRIB, Zarr, and YAML libraries.
Following common practice in operations, we will use formal releases of these libraries only. Tentatively, we intend to keep local copies of these libraries to assure that library use does not interfere with off-line work on WW4.
One WW4 is mature, we will provide one-line options to compile WW4 in an established configuration. For now, we are keeping things simple by directly using CMake after an initial WW4 setup (see below)
To set up the compile environment interactively, go to the root directory of your clone and start the interactive setup of WW4 by running
./tools/ww4_setup
which will attempt to set up the environment including compilers and compile options. After this command has been run once, the tools directory will be added to the search path in your default shell script setup, and the tool can be called without providing a directory path.
After the setup of WW4 is completed, the code can be compiled interactively by running the following two cmake commands
cmake -B build
cmake --build build
It is sometimes handy te clean-up the entire clone to enforce a full re-compilation, for instance when compiler options are changed. This can be achieved by running
cmake --build build --target clean
We will be regularly updating the FAQs page with answers to common questions.
For information on contributing to WW4, please see the Contributing to WW4 page.
