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DECAF

Overview 

Description:

DECAF is the first integrated study of the combined interactions and feedbacks between tropical deforestation, fire, atmospheric composition and climate. To address this important challenge, DECAF will exploit new information from in-situ and satellite observations in combination with state-of-the-art numerical models. DECAF will deliver improved process-level knowledge of the impacts of deforestation on atmospheric composition and climate and a step-change in our understanding of the interactions and feedbacks between deforestation, atmospheric composition and climate. New understanding will inform the development of climate and Earth System Models and will facilitate new climate and Earth system assessments.


CEMAC Role

Summary - Provide support on Numerical modeling of deforestation - atmospheric feedback

Main Tool - WRF 

CEMAC's roles is to provide general WRFChem support and improve workflow

1. Parallelize Post Processing

During the post processing stage of the model runs the data is double in order to half the total output this means until the post processing has completed roughly 100G of data exists
for every 20 GB output.

Post Processing was done in serial and took longer than the model run leading to large amounts of storage being used whilst waiting to pass this bottleneck

CEMAC has simply wrapped the post processing into a bash function with local variables to run in parallel as an initial fix giving a 3-4 times speed up, allowing the post processing step to no longer take longer than the main modelling step

cores v time

2. Premade WRFChem Modules

To save on space and time CEMAC has pre-built versions of WRF Chem on the local system so that users using standard WRFChem do not need to build individual executables. Outlined in our ARC repository.

3. WRFotron support and improvements

The University of Leeds uses an automated "WRFotron" process created by Christoph Knote and Luke Conibear. This is now maintained on GitHub in the WRFChem-Leeds organisation , over time this is automated process is being improved upon and updated, including modification to work with the pre-built cemac modules


 

Skills Used

WRF - WRFChem - Bash - SGE - NCO - NCL