History Control

This section provides a brief overview of the GEOS GCM output control. At its highest level, model output is controlled through a resource file named HISTORY.rc; many times, this file comes in templated format, which means it contains entries that are filled in at runtime, in such cases, the files is typically found under the name HISTORY.rc.tmpl.

The output of GEOS GCM is subset in files, referred to as COLLECTIONS. An example of a COLLECTION table is provided below:

"COLLECTIONS: 'geosgcm_prog'

            'geosgcm_surf'
            'geosgcm_moist'
            'geosgcm_turb'
            'geosgcm_gwd'
            'geosgcm_tend'
            'geosgcm_budi'
            'geosgcm_buda'
            'geosgcm_landice'
            'geosgcm_meltwtr'
            'geosgcm_snowlayer'
            'geosgcm_tracer'

\>>>HIST_GOCART<<< 'tavg2d_aer_x' \>>>HIST_GOCART<<< 'tavg3d_aer_p' \# 'geosgcm_iau' \# 'geosgcm_conv' \# 'goswim_catch' \# 'goswim_land' \# 'goswim_landice' \# 'geosgcm_lidar'

"

The table follows MAPL's (and MPEU's) convention of starting with a name (COLLECTION) and editing with two colons (::). The particular example above would be found in a file with the extension "tmpl' to indicate it is a template file (meaning, it has entries in a format >>>ENTRY<<< which get replaced by something meaningful at runtime.

Users can control the freely the collections (or output streams) they want by simply commenting or uncommenting existing collections --- a "#" sign is a comment, which the reading software ignores.

Each collection defines its own meta-information.