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April 11, 2008

This tutorial will go over some of the basic steps to set up a ROMS realistic application (yet, this is a very simple one). This tutorial is also a demonstration of how to use EASYGRID, a "quick-and-dirty" matlab script to make ROMS grids and initialization files.

PREREQUISITES: This tutorial assumes that you have downloaded ROMS, installed it in your computer (or cluster), and test it by compiling and running one of the included test cases.

Geographical Setting: This application is for Ship Harbour, an estuarine fjord in Nova Scotia, Canada. Click here to see the location in Google. Tides are semidiurnal and tidal range is 1.4 m on average and 2 m on spring tides. For now I will only include tidal forcing, however, there is a river at the uppermost end of the estuary, which discharges freshwater at an annual average rate of 18 m3 s-1. I plan to write another tutorial on how to add a river, but for now is only tides. Ship Harbour has a shallow sill of approximately 7 m depth. Average depth of the inner basin is 15 m with a maximum of 25 m.

Conditioning Matlab

Matlab is a powerful software that is commonly used to create ROMS inputs and to visualize and analyze ROMS output. However, out-of-the-box Matlab doesn't come with the capabilities to read/write ROMS NetCDF files. For that you need to download and install MEXNC, SNCTOOLS and the ROMS Matlab toolkit. Follow these links for tutorials with step-by-step instructions.

Scilab and Octave are free Matlab-like software. For the MEXNC-equivalent for Scilab, Click here