The software bazaar
The software bazaar
As
Eric Raymond would say : The software cathedral has failed and
the future belongs to the bazaar. To follow his wisdom we provide here
the source code of programs for generating, reading and manipulating
data in the ALMA data exchange format written by the land-surface
modelling community. Everybody is encouraged to contribute : A small
bug report is often more useful than 10000 lines of code too complex
to be used by anybody ! The source codes should also serve as
examples for generating code which deals with data in the ALMA
exchange format.
We hope that the list below will expand in the month to comes with
tools/programs contributed by the users of the ALMA format.
- Time manipulation
- A small program to manipulate the
time axis in a netCDF file.
- Regular grids
- The GDT convention
allows to store non-rectilinear grids. This generality is not always
needed and not supported by all software packages. Thus it may be
useful in some cases to restrict the generality of the coordinates in
the file. ncregular does this if possible.
- Sign convention
- This programs allows to change the
sign convention of a file (to be
written).
- Changing units of files
- The units chosen for the ALMA
data exchange format are not the most widely used. We thus provide
here a code to change the units of Kg/m^2s into mm/d or vice versa
(to be written).
- Converting from ASCII files to netCDF
- A number
of programs already exist which transform forcing data for
land-surface schemes into netCDF files which comply with the ALMA conventions. The following
examples are available for the moment :
For data sets which can be downloaded via FTP, the netCDF file as well
as the code which generated it are provided.
- Land-Surface scheme drivers
- The implementation of the
PILPS-4c driver used by SECHIBA&STOMATE can directly read in the ALMA
forcing files. The
description and the code of the driver are distributed on the
PILPS-4c page.
- Quality check program
- This program verifies that the
netCDF file corresponds to the ALMA standard by verifying the units,
sign convention and range of values of all variables (to be written).
- A library to write and read netCDF files directly from your
model
- This F90 library provides simple subroutines to write
efficiently data out of your model or read and write restart
files. The IPSL
implementation of the PILPS_4c coupler provides an example of its
application.
- Solar incident angle calculation
- Calculate the solar
zenith angle and the direction from the information of the point
(longitude and latitude) and the time (UTC). (to
be written)
Last modified: Mon May 15 22:26:27 WEST 2000