TERRAIN Tutorial : How to Run

The first step in preparing to run program TERRAIN, is to create and edit terrain.deck

1. Type to create terrain.deck:
   make terrain.deck
   
   If it is successful, the last message printed will say:
      Making terrain deck for your_machine
      i.e. Making terrain deck for Compaq (on a Dec machine)
   

2. Edit terrain.deck on your machine until you hit "END OF USER MODIFICATION". 

   1. The default deck has everything selected to do the SOC case, so no changes to the deck should be necessary. You can check the parameters defined in the deck against what is described in the Notes (Chapter 15).

   2. You seldom or ever need to change anything below the "END OF USER MODIFICATION" line.

   3. Also click on the example terrain.deck to see highlighted parameters that need to be considered and changed if you start to configure your own case. Some of the more commonly used variables have clickable links with additional information. Other namelist variables can be left as they are unless there is special need to change them. (The deck you see here is an example for Compaq machine.)

   4. For complete references to all script variables and namelist variables, please see section 4.7 - 4.9 in Chapter 4 of the Tutorial Notes.

The next step is to compiler and run program TERRAIN:

   terrain.deck >& log &

The terrain.deck will first compile, and output from the compilation is redirected to a file called 'make.terrain.out'. You should check this file to see if compilation is carried out successfully. If the compilation is successful, you should get four executables created in the src/ directory:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 mesouser users 33632    Oct 23 13:52 src/rdnml
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mesouser users 91856    Oct 23 13:52 src/data_area.exe
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mesouser users 43952    Oct 23 13:52 src/rdem.exe
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mesouser users 2795760 Oct 23 13:52 src/terrain.exe

These executables are used for:

The deck will then go to NCAR's ftp site to get the basic set of input data to your local machine under directory Data/. The ftp is carried out by using the file ftp.csh in Data/ directory. If you set NTYPE = 6 in terrain.deck, another ftp script: ftp30s.csh will also be used to get additional data.

If you have problems downloading the data automatically, download the files manually from NCAR's ftp site, and place them in the Data/ directory. For 30sec data, download the topographical files from the USGS site http://edcdaac.usgs.gov/gtopo30/gtopo30.html Place these files in the TERRAIN/Data30s/ directory. download the remaining 30sec data files from the NCAR ftp site: ftp://ftp.ucar.edu/mesouser/MM5V3/TERRAIN_DATA/ Place these files in the TERRAIN/Data/ directory.

Next, the deck will run the TERRAIN program. If everything is successful, you should see these files in the directory:

-rw-r--r--   1 mesouser users     900000 Mar 17 11:15 TER.PLT
-rw-r--r--   1 mesouser users     170912 Mar 17 11:15 TERRAIN_DOMAIN1
-rw-r--r--   1 mesouser users     210980 Mar 17 11:15 TERRAIN_DOMAIN2
-rw-r--r--   1 mesouser users      18149 Mar 17 11:15 terrain.print.out

where terrain.print.out is log file of all print statements generated by Terrain program, TERRAIN_DOMAINx are binary output files that are going to be used by other MM5 programs, and TER.PLT is a plot file generated by NCAR Graphics. In the SOC case, there are two domains (MAXNES=2) so you will get two binary output files, and 15 frames in the plot file. The example uses USGS 24-category landuse data.

Always check the end of terrain.print.out file to see if this line appears:

  == NORMAL TERMINATION OF TERRAIN PROGRAM ==

This is a good indication that the Terrain program has successfully run. Check to see how big the sizes of binary files are - they shouldn't have 0 size.

To view TER.PLT generated by Terrain, type

  idt TER.PLT &

(See man page on idt if necessary: man idt)

If you've seen these files generated in your TERRAIN directory, and you've checked your plot file to see if they compare OK with our example TER.PLT, then your attempt to run the first program in MM5 modeling system suite is a success!

Test to make sure that the TERRAIN_DOMAINx files have been created correctly. This can easily been done by making use of the readv3.f utility. Download this utility to you local compute and compile (for more information refer to Chapter 14 of the Tutorial Notes).    readv3.exe   TERRAIN_DOMAIN1   >&   header_log &

You can now move to the next program: REGRID.

Remember to revisit the TERRAIN program once you have completed the tutorial and view the Examples, Miscellaneous and Trouble Shooting pages.