[ncl-talk] IOAPIST: an IOAPI spatiotemporality checker

[Tom Roche]

Recently I lost much time learning that I had been provided with inputs for a CMAQ[1] run that were not spatiotemporally compatible (!STC). It now appears that no one knows which contractor generated a particular subset of the files, or where they were archived, so the previous run, and the study based upon that run, are no longer replicable.

CCTM[2] will certainly tell, eventually, if one has !STC inputs, but it may take awhile to get CCTM running, and to get past other errors. Accordingly I have written IOAPIST[3] to allow (hopefully) quick, accurate, and early scanning of sets of inputs. It's pretty simple--just some NCL to compare metadata of two files or sets of files, and a bash driver to tell NCL how to do it--so I hope the README at the link above makes clear how to use it. If you're still using something like IDL or NCO for netCDF fiddling, this may also demonstrate NCL's superior ease-of-use. (The superiority of NCL's documentation can only be experienced via its website[4], which is linked from the above.)

Your comments, suggestions, and bug reports are welcome. (Probably :-) Better yet, fork the code and send me a pull request!

HTH, Tom Roche <Tom_Roche at pobox.com>

[1]: https://www.cmascenter.org/cmaq/
[2]: http://www.airqualitymodeling.org/cmaqwiki/index.php?title=CMAQ_version_5.0_%28February_2010_release%29_OGD&CFID=1562793&CFTOKEN=fe13abeffca82560-CFE5EC3A-C586-8425-AFADC84685FED2E0#CMAQ_Chemistry-Transport_Model_.28CCTM.29
[3]: https://bitbucket.org/tlroche/ioapi_spatiotemporality_checker
[4]: http://www.ncl.ucar.edu/