PyROMS vs Octant

[JDTilley]

I am curious what the difference is between these two distributions found on GitHub. I mainly use Python and think one of these will be useful for me creating grids and boundary files. However, I can't tell which one I should use. According to the PyROMS page:

Pyroms is a collection of tools to help with input and output files
from the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS). It was originally
started by Rob Hetland as a googlecode project, then he morphed it
into octant, also at googlecode. Frederic Castruccio then created a
fork and renamed it back to pyroms. This version is still rather
rough around the edges.

So did Octant change back to PyROMS? Looking through the directories it seems they are different. PyROMS seems to have more recent maintenance, but I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing. Does anyone have experience with these two forks?

[kate]

I only know about pyroms, at that, only parts of pyroms. I use it to create boundary and initial files from various sources. Perhaps if you tell us exactly what you need, we can tell you if we have a solution.

[JDTilley]

Thanks. I am mostly interested in what you are talking about, particularly the boundary file part. Still it would be nice to have some libraries for visualization and other things. I already made a grid file in Python on my own, and it looked right when I looked at it in Okean. Its the boundary file I'm confused about. How is the data set up in a boundary file? If I remember correctly, it goes W, N, S, E. Do I have a separate array for each boundary? And do the corner points repeat themselves? I want a 3D model, so would the netcdf have 4 2d arrays per environmental parameter? And each array's dimensions be (horizontal_dimensions, sigma)? It would be helpful for me to understand this. I think the main function I'm after is Gridgen, so I may end up being ok with just pygridgen. But I've been running into some issues. I did manage to get it installed, but then gridgen didn't play well with Octant (I went ahead and gave that one a shot). So right now I don't have anything working with gridgen. That may be another thread if I can't get it. My ultimate goal is a coupled biophysical model similar to Dr. Hetland's phosphorus model with a couple extra tracers. So I have a long way to go to say the least.

[kate]

Yes, each 3-D field needs four boundary fields, one for each side. Pyroms will make them if you follow the boundary examples, assuming there's an example for your input field. There should also be a CDL example in the ROMS directory tree under Data.

[JDTilley]

Thanks for the info. I managed to get Octant running, so I'll look for the same function in there. I'll give the CDL example a shot. Thanks.