Technical corner

Objectives

Provide guidelines, protocols, and tools to OCMIP participants in order to facilitate the exchange, analysis, and visualization of output from ocean carbon-cycle models.

Contact: Patrick Brockmann brock@lsce.saclay.cea.fr

Data Exchange Format

For OCMIP-2, participants must exchange their model output with the analysis center in netCDF format. In addition, OCMIP-2 netCDF files will follow COARDS conventions as well as a recently proposed extension "GDT netCDF conventions for climate data". Information concerning these three standards can be found below:

Analysis and Visualization Tools

The following tools are what we currently use to analyze output from the multiple models participating in OCMIP-2

Ferret was built by oceanographers at NOAA's PMEL in Seattle to analyze both model output and data. Ferret offers a relatively straightforward method to analyze model output graphically and otherwise.  Also it is publically available by ftp.  Unfortunately it cannot treat all OCMIP model grids.

Tecplot can handle any grid, but for non-graphical analysis it is not as tuned for oceanographers as is Ferret. Still, it offers a friendly visual interface and a powerful batch language that can be programmed to do most anything. Unfortunately, Tecplot is not free.