[MITgcm-support] Tracmass for MITgcm

[Andrea Cimatoribus]

Dear all,
as a follow up to my previous messages, and given the relatively strong 
interest in the topic I see lately, I thought I should somehow 
"advertise" the work I am doing on the tracmass code 
(http://tracmass.org/) by Döös et al.

I am working on a fork of the original code, here:

https://github.com/sambarluc/tracmass

(sooner or later it will have to be moved to a new repo on the 
institutional git server, but for now it's there)

I maintained the same numerical core, and focused on:
- enabling a more straightforward use of the MITgcm cartesian and 
curvilinear grids (done and relatively well tested on my MITgmc results)
- simplifying the treatment of the time axis (I basically removed all 
calendar functionality, since I found it overly complicated for my needs 
and error prone, I am planning to deal with that via python, but haven't 
written anything yet)
- providing netcdf output (works nicely, with minimal overhead)
- adding a python interface to run the code and load the results (works, 
but not yet well tested and far from complete in terms of running 
tracmass from python)

I want to stress that the code is still mostly the original by Döös et 
al. Still, I think it can provide some advantages to MITgcm and python 
users now. I should also stress that only parts of it have been tested. 
For instance, I never used any of the turbulence parameterizations - and 
doubt I will ever -, the "analytical time stepping" works ok only for 2D 
advection, for 3D I think numerical errors are an issue but did not 
investigate any further. In any case, since I am approaching the stage 
at which "it works fine for what I need now," I thought it was good to 
share with the world. Maybe others are interested, are willing to test, 
find bugs, contribute, etc.

Best, Andrea

-- 
Andrea Cimatoribus
postdoctoral researcher
EPFL ENAC IIE ECOL
https://people.epfl.ch/andrea.cimatoribus