[MITgcm-support] diagnostics parameter

[Martin Losch]

Hi there,

this is a problem that I keep running into, and since the search function on mitgcm.org does not help very much (as usual), I have to ask this question again:

For debugging reasons, I want the model to start from a pickup at nIter0 = 131544. My timestep is deltaT = 1200. I want the model to write diagnostics at each timestep after timestep 141192, i.e. after the model has reached the time 141192*1200sec = 169430400sec=134days. I thought that I could do it like this in data.diagnostics (<http://mitgcm.org/pipermail/mitgcm-support/2010-August/006799.html>):

   filename(1) = 'myfile',
   frequency(1) = 1.,
   timePhase(1) = 169430400.,
   fields(1,1) = 'ETAN    ', ….

because it says in the standard data.diagnostics files in the verification experiments:
#  timePhase(n)     : write at time = timePhase + multiple of |frequency|

Obviously I got it wrong because now the model writes output at timesteps 132408 (after 12 days), 134568 (42days), 136800 (73days), etc.
Where did I go wrong, and how can I do it correctly?

Analogously in the diag_stats name list, I specified stats_freq=1 and stats_phase=169430400 and got output every time step from the very beginning (so already at time step 131544). Why are the two parameter sets behaving so differently?

Martin