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 Prerequisites)

  2. Build the serial netCDF library

  3. Build the parallel-netCDF library

  4. Build the Parallel I/O (PIO) library

  5. (OPTIONAL) Build the METIS package

  6. Obtain the MPAS-Model source code

  7. Build the init_atmosphere and atmosphere cores


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

  3. Link physics lookup tables (src/core_atmosphere/physics/physics wrf/files/*) to the run directory

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

  5. Edit the namelist files and the stream files appropriately (see Running MPAS-Atmosphere)

  6. (OPTIONAL) Prepare meshes for the simulation

  7. Run init_atmosphere_model to create initial conditions for idealized cases or for real-data cases

  8. Run “atmosphere_model” to perform model integration