Quick Start Guide

This chapter provides MPAS-Atmosphere users with a high-level description of the general process of building and running the model. It is meant simply as a brief overview of the process, with more detailed descriptions of each step are provided in later chapters.


Building MPAS-A

The build process generally uses the following steps.

  1. Build or locate an MPI implementation (MPICH, OpenMPI, MVAPICH2, MPT, etc; see the “Prerequisites” section in Building MPAS)

  2. Build the serial netCDF library (see the “NetCDF” subsection in Building MPAS)

  3. Build the parallel-netCDF library (see the “Parallel-NetCDF” subsection in Building MPAS)

  4. Build the Parallel I/O (PIO) library (see the “PIO” subsection in Building MPAS)

  5. (OPTIONAL) build the METIS package (See the “Graph Partitioning with METIS” section in Preparing Meshes)

  6. Obtain the MPAS-Model source code

  7. Build the init_atmosphere and atmosphere cores (see the “Compiling MPAS” section in Building MPAS)


After completing these steps, the following executable files should be available in the top-level MPAS-Model directory.

  • init_atmosphere_model

  • atmosphere_model

  • build_tables



Running an MPAS-A Global Simulation

Note

The three executables (discussed in the above section) must be available prior to running the code.


A basic global simulation can be performed using the following steps.

  1. Create a run directory

  2. Link the init_atmosphere_model and atmosphere_model executables to the run directory, as well as physics lookup tables (src/core_atmosphere/physics/physics wrf/files/*)

  3. Copy the namelist.*, streams.*, and stream_list.* files to the run directory.

  4. Edit the namelist files and the stream files appropriately (see Running the MPAS Non-hydrostatic Atmosphere Model)

  5. (OPTIONAL) prepare meshes for the simulation (see Preparing Meshes).

  6. Run init_atmosphere_model to create initial conditions (see the “Creating Idealized ICs” or “Creating Real-data ICs” section from Running the MPAS Non-hydrostatic Atmosphere Model).

  7. Run atmosphere_model to perform model integration (see “Running the Model” from Running the MPAS Non-hydrostatic Atmosphere Model).