Using the LibCF/GRIDSPEC extensions to interpret data on mosaic grids with CDAT
Abstract
Increasingly earth system models perform computations on grids that are not describable as simple, rectangular arrays (e.g. lon by lat), instead requiring a mosaic of interacting, logically rectangular tiles. Such grids are developed for a variety of reasons that include removal of coordinate singularities that may degrade numerical reliability in a region of interest (e.g. the north pole in an ocean model) and increasing the uniformity of numerical precision over the globe. Coupled earth system models, typically characterized by independent coordinate reference systems for modeling atmosphere, ocean, ice, and terrestrial processes, are themselves examples of such mosaic grids. GRIDSPEC is a proposed set of conventions to the Climate and Forecast library (LibCF) describing data on mosaic grids developed by V. Balaji et al. (Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory). It supports unstructured assemblies of structured grids, including the cubed-sphere and tripolar meshes. Here we review a GRIDSPEC NetCDF format based on host, contact, grid, and data files. We will show how mosaic grids can be created from the ground up using a C API and the Python Climate Data Anaysis Tools (CDAT) for visualization. As an application we use GRIDSPEC to regrid cubed-sphere data onto a longitude-latitude grid.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2010
- Bibcode:
- 2010AGUFM.A13B0211K
- Keywords:
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- 1904 INFORMATICS / Community standards;
- 1946 INFORMATICS / Metadata;
- 1976 INFORMATICS / Software tools and services