[mpas-developers] proposed date/time manager

Jones, Philip W pwjones at lanl.gov
Thu Apr 21 16:09:40 MDT 2011


Michael,

Looks good.  A few comments below.

On 4/21/11 2:30 PM, "Michael Duda" <duda at ucar.edu> wrote:
One question that came to my mind is whether the requirement that the
time manager support simulations of 100,000 years without round-off
imply the need to support a millenium in addition to a four-digit year?

You could handle it that way.  However, a more flexible approach would be to handle it similar to the optional HMS.  That is, if the year is longer than four digits, allow the string to include all significant digits (and if its an input argument check for the number of digits before the first hyphen).  I would still keep a floor of 4 digits - no one likes to see a 1,2,3-digit year and would prefer seeing the leading zeros in those cases.   BTW, I wouldn't consider this a high priority requirement, but there are a class of climate users who run coarse resolution configurations for very long paleoclimate simulations, so we'll need it eventually.

Is there a reason for a direction?  Seems like a negative time interval would meet that requirement and eliminate some arguments.  I seem to remember this turned into a heated argument during the ESMF design, but can't remember what the controversy was...

It might be nice to have a time interval returned in floating point seconds (actually a double) for cases where you really just want to divide by a time interval (e.g. For time averaging), but maybe it's best to leave the interface cleaner and let the user compute that from the S,Sn,Sd args.  Again, I'm ok either way - just happens enough that it might be a convenient shortcut.

Thanks,

Phil

---
Correspondence/TSPA/DUSA EARTH
------------------------------------------------------------
Philip Jones                                pwjones at lanl.gov
Climate, Ocean and Sea Ice Modeling
Los Alamos National Laboratory
T-3 MS B216                                 Ph: 505-500-2699
PO Box 1663                                Fax: 505-665-5926
Los Alamos, NM 87545-1663





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