This repository is being used to update the original Biome 4 code created by Jed Kaplan with the following aims:

• ensure it works with more recent releases of the netcdf library,
• maintain an updated Makefile for use with gfortran
• clear out some of the compilation warnings (mostly the trivial whitespace ones at the moment!)
• adding a more user friendly command line interface via f90getopt

The program now sets the input file, output file, global settings and CO2 concentration from the command line

Usage: biome4 -i input.nc -o output.nc \
              -s settings.txt -c 410 
Options:
  -h  --help      Print this help screen
Required arguments:
  -i  --input     Input data file
  -o  --output    Output data file
  -s  --settings  Global settings file
  -c  --co2       CO2 (ppm)

The biome4 executable expected to find two files in the directory from which it was run:

• biome4outvars set the netcdf naming and formatting for possible output variables.

• biome4options set some fairly static options, such as the output variable choices, but also set things that would change with every run, including:

  • the CO2 concentration
  • the path to the input data (which then had to be called inputdata.nc
  • the output directory

So if you had a directory with the following structure.

/rds/general/home/dorme/biome4_2012/inputdata.nc
/rds/general/home/dorme/biome4_2012/biome4outvars
/rds/general/home/dorme/biome4_2012/biome4options
/rds/general/home/dorme/biome4_2012/out/

The first three lines of biome4options could then be:

/rds/general/home/dorme/biome4_2012/
/rds/general/home/dorme/biome4_2012/out/
400

And you could then:

cd /rds/general/home/dorme/biome4_2012/
/path/to/the/compile/biome4

All of the options at run time were then read from those two files.

This is really inflexible - for multiple runs, all the input files would have to have the same file name and each run would need a separate option file.

• The latitude and longitude limits are either set as a window (which subsets the provided data) or fixed at -180:180 and -60:90. This doesn't work when the input file itself is a subset, so maybe read those dimensions from the input file.