diagnostics_vec: A diagnostics package for MITgcm

Authors: Michael Wood, Ian Fenty, April Shin

Package Purpose and Motivation

The MITgcm model has one method for outputting model "diagnostics" for a particular experiment: dump the entire field. While entire model fields are desired for many experiements, this is not always the case. Here, we design a model package which is capable of outputting model diagnostics in a subset of the model domain e.g. along a vector (or "vec").

Getting Started

The purpose of this repository is to provide a convenient way to merge new package files, verification experiments, and documentation into a fresh clone (and potentially an eventual fork) of the main branch of MITgcm. To faciliate this merge, there are three convenient scripts provided in the utils directory. To start, clone this repository into a convenient drive on your machine. Then, cd to the utils directory and run the following code from the command line, passing the path to a (preferrably fresh) clone of the main branch of the MITgcm:

python3 copy_doc_files_to_MITgcm.py -m /path/to/MITgcm_fresh
python3 copy_pkg_files_to_MITgcm_.py -m /path/to/MITgcm_fresh
python3 copy_verification_files_to_MITgcm.py -m /path/to/MITgcm_fresh

Repository Structure:

The main components to be included in the eventual pull request are staged in three directories as follows:

• doc: updates to the documentation for the readthedocs page
• pkg: the diagnostics_vec package files
• verification: experiments to be added to the verification directory of MITgcm to ensure the package is working as desired

Note that this repository has two additional directories which will not be included in the eventual pull request:

• example_configurations: a set of examples showing how the package works in a variety of configurations - jupyter notebooks are additionally provided to demonstrate the package use
• utils: functions that facilitate the development of this package and the eventual pull request, as described above

Recommended Future Improvements to diagnostics_vec

1. Implement option to output data into a netCDF file, using the mnc package.
2. Add option to output a "snapshot" by providing frequecy as a negative number (following the convention established in the diagnostics package)
3. Add option to use different averaging frequencies for each mask. ✅
4. Add option to limit number of iterations stored in output files ✅

California Institute of Technology Copyright Statement

Copyright 2021, by the California Institute of Technology. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. United States Government Sponsorship acknowledged. Any commercial use must be negotiated with the Office of Technology Transfer at the California Institute of Technology.

This software may be subject to U.S. export control laws. By accepting this software, the user agrees to comply with all applicable U.S. export laws and regulations. User has the responsibility to obtain export licenses, or other export authority as may be required before exporting such information to foreign countries or providing access to foreign persons.