ROMSTOOLS: A Series of Tools for the Pre- and Post-processing of Oceanic Regional ROMS Simulations.

Pierrick Penven

To perform a regional simulation using the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS), the modeler needs to provide a series of data files in a specific format: horizontal grid, topography, surface forcing and lateral boundary conditions. He also needs to visualize and analyze the model outputs.

Still recently, to perform these tasks, although useful tools were already available on the Internet, the modeler was to gather the necessary material from scattered sources: Fortran programs, Matlab routines,graphic softwares and topographic, surface and in-situ data.

In an attempt to facilitate the first stages of the modeling work, a series of Matlab routines and a few essential datasets were regrouped in an integrated toolbox. The goal was to be able to generate a "standard" ROMS configuration for almost any part of the world in a few minutes.

The datasets employed are : etopo2 for the bottom topography, COADS for the surface fluxes and the World Ocean Atlas 2001 for the initial and the lateral boundary conditions. The Matlab routines can be easily transformed to process other datasets (for example OGCM outputs). Tides can be added from the TPXO6 global dataset. A graphic user interface simplifies the generation of embedded models. For the post-processing, a few basic statistic tools are included and a graphic user interface is provided for the visualization (romsgui). Romsgui is also able to compute derived parameters such as: relative vorticity, potential vorticity, kinetic energy, horizontal stream function, or the Okubo-Weiss parameter.