The 2019 ROMS 4D-Var Workshop will be held at the NOAA Center for Weather and Climate Prediction (NCWCP) building in College Park, Maryland, July 29 - August 2, 2019.

If you are foreign national attending the workshop you will need to complete the OSY Foreign National Request form and submit it to NOAA Security. This form must be processed and foreign nationals must be cleared by NOAA Security prior to the workshop in order to enter the NCWCP building and attend the workshop. Green Card holders do not need to fill out this form. The form can be accessed via this link.

There are a handful of states whose REAL ID compliance extension will expire before or during the workshop. If your government issued ID (driver's license) is from one of these states you will need your U.S. passport or passport card in order to enter the NCWCP building. For more information check this link.

The purpose of the workshop is to train experienced users of ROMS how to use the advanced suite of 4D-Var ocean data assimilation and related diagnostics tools that are part of the ROMS standard code release.

The workshop will run for 5 days, Monday-Friday. Morning sessions will be devoted to tutorial style lectures on 4D-Var as relevant to the ROMS systems. Afternoon sessions will be dedicated to hands-on exercises and model applications.

The first two days (Monday and Tuesday) will cover the relevant theory of 4D-Var and how it is applied in ROMS. Each aspect of the ROMS 4D-Var set-up will be covered during the morning sessions. The afternoon sessions on Monday and Tuesday will be devoted to running an existing ROMS 4D-Var configuration, most likely the California Current system, for which all components of the ROMS 4D-Var system have been rigorously applied and tested.

The last three days (Wednesday through Friday) will be devoted to teaching participants how to set up and run ROMS 4D-Var for their own particular application. The morning sessions will be spent covering technical aspects of the ROMS 4D-Var set-up, and during the afternoon sessions participants will work on configuring their own specific ROMS application.

The goal of the workshop is for each participant to have a working version of ROMS 4D-Var configured for their own domain of interest running by the end of the workshop, which they can continue to experiment with after returning to their home institution.

1. Because of the highly technical nature of the ROMS 4D-Var system, this workshop is limited to advanced users of ROMS, and participation is by invitation only.


2. Workshop participants must come with the following:
   1. Remote access to a parallel computer (MPI only) at their home institution, or a national supercomputer center on which they routinely run their ROMS application
   2. A laptop computer to connect to remote parallel computer at their home institution.
   3. Matlab with a working NetCDF interface is recommended
   4. A working ROMS configuration on remote parallel computer with all libraries installed (NetCDF and ARPACK/PARPACK)
   5. A comprehensive set of observations that will be assimilated into their respective ROMS configuration

1. You may wish to team up with another person attending the workshop and work in pairs, in which case you would both work on a single configuration of ROMS.


2. Try to avoid working with a very large ROMS grid. 4D-Var is computationally very demanding so configurations with very high resolution and/or large grids will slow you down at the workshop. If you have multiple grids at different resolutions for your specific ROMS application, we recommend using the lowest resolution grid for this workshop - this will maximize your learning experience.


3. It is VERY important that you have remote access to a parallel computer cluster on which you routinely run your ROMS application. This will be your only source of computing power on which you will run all tutorials and develop 4D-Var for your application. Parallel computing is a MUST, and it is probably best to not to rely on national supercomputer centers because of the limits imposed on job queues and slow turn around times.


4. The workshop will be held in a state-of-the-art lecture room with high speed internet access at every seat, and multiple projection facilities. You must bring your own laptop on which to work and access your home computing facilities.


5. NO LOCAL COMPUTING FACILITIES WILL BE AVAILABLE TO WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS.