| | 63 | Within work package 4, the following developments have been performed: |
| | 64 | |
| | 65 | * '''CONCEPT OF INTERMEDIATE FORMAT AND IMPLEMENTATION''' [wiki:Fpconcept Concept of implementation], [wiki:Fpdocu Documentation on .fp format] |
| | 66 | * Documentation on the existing and new workflows was produced |
| | 67 | * The new .fp format was described in detail |
| | 68 | * A number of surprises were encountered, including the discovery that met data in a forward run is not exactly the same data that will be generated in a backward run with the same GRIB files. |
| | 69 | * '''UPDATES FLEXtest ENVIRONMENT:''' [wiki:TestEnv Update of the testing environment] |
| | 70 | * For development we need to attack the problem through a Test Driven Development (TDD) paradigm, and chose to invest heavily in the expansion of our earlier work, developing a semi-automated approach to rapidly testing new software modifications for the introduction of bugs |
| | 71 | * The environment consists of small tests embedded in the FLEXPART distribution that allows developers to immediately determine if their changes have had detrimental effects. It is also suitable for "outside the distribution" environments to perform large-scale regression tests. It will be a necessary component in future FLEXPART enhancements. |
| | 72 | * '''GRIB2FLEXPART UTILITY:''' [wiki:PreProcUtil Pre-processing command-line utility] |
| | 73 | * A flexible command-line utility, ''grib2flexpart'', was developed to pre-process met files outside of a FLEXPART simulation. |
| | 74 | * Simultaneously, FLEXPART was modified to optionally use these ''.fp'' files as input, providing one to two orders of magnitude greater efficiency in input ingest. |
| | 75 | * An exciting potential of this work is that this approach may be used to define an intermediate ''.fp'' met format, to which any met data may be converted, and then used to drive FLEXPART simulations. |
| | 76 | * '''VERIFICATION TESTS:''' [wiki:VerifPreProc Verification tests] |
| | 77 | * The testing environment was used in various ways to |
| | 78 | * Verify that the results of using ''grib2flexpart'' to generate .fp files, and then use the .fp files to drive a FLEXPART run, were identical to those obtained by using FLEXPART with traditional GRIB met input |
| | 79 | * Test the performance (with the addition of conditionally-compiled timing routines) of the pre-processing paradigm relative to the traditional paradigm of GRIB met file ingest. Results suggest that a huge amount of time is spent processing the GRIB met files, and that once this is done, the dump to .fp format, and loading from .fp format gives an estimated order of magnitude gain in performance__. |
| | 80 | |
| | 81 | |
| | 82 | |
| | 83 | |
| | 84 | |
