MM5V3 WIDEALGRID package for Idealized Simulations

Synopsis

MM5 is a popular, modern wikipedia:Limited Area Atmospheric Model maintained by wikipedia:National Center for Atmospheric Research, CO, USA. This model is geared towards operational and research simulations of actual atmosphere. Sometimes it is useful to have the ability to define hypothetical conditions under which the model should operate. However, this is not a standard feature of the model. There are several solutions for this problem, proposed by various people. I have been using th e Idealgrid package during 2002. Later, I needed to add moisture fields to the idealized conditions, which was not possible to do with the original Idealgrid. Therefore I hacked Idealgrid, added a new landform and landuse generation module (it was not available in Idealgrid), renamed as widealgrid (wet-idealgrid) and used for my research work during 2004-2006.

Package

Download from here. (You need bzip2 to expand it)

Expand and then untar the file. You get two files:
terrainMake.tar & widealgrid.tar

1. terrainMake:

Untar the file, then read the README file inside. The package is written in Java, so you need a java compiler (a standard component of Linux thesedays) to run it.

2. widealgrid:

Untar at the target regridder directory
creates
widealgrid folder with a number of files
a new namelist.input file.

Enjoy!

You may want to read our recent paper. (Please refer to that if you write any publications using widealgrid).

 

A. Pathirana, S. Herath and T. Yamada, Simulating orographic rainfall with a limited-area, non-hydrostatic atmospheric model under idealized forcing, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 5, 215-226, 2005