Seems that I keep answering this question over an over. Perhaps, the information on the web site is not that clear about this. Firstly, the Fortran codes for the initialization package have not been updated in several years. I think that nobody is using these programs nowadays since there is a lot of Matlab scripts around to build initial and other ROMS input NetCDF files. The Matlab scripts are very easy to use and have a lot of flexibility.
Secondly, every time that you see
_r8 errors during compilation, it indicates that you are not using the appropriate
cpp program or
cpp flags in the makefile. We need a
cpp program that allows multiple substitutions in a single line. The
cpp program available in some operating systems do not allow this. In such a case, we provide a
cpp program that the user needs to compile. It is very easy to do by downloading the following tar file:
http://www.myroms.org/software/Processing/cpp/cpp.tar
This
cpp program was written by der Mouse several years ago and it is very robust. Information about this is also provided in the
Processing Packages menu of the ROMS web site.
The
_r8 is an alias to provide the same capability of the
kind atribute of Fortran 90. Recall, that all these ROMS processing programs are written in Fortran 77. Nowadays, ROMS is written in Fortran 90 and we do not longer have such compilation problems.