The Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS) is a collaborative project for developing atmosphere, ocean, and other earth-system simulation components for use in climate, regional climate, and weather studies. The primary development partners are the climate modeling group at Los Alamos National Laboratory (COSIM) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Both primary partners are responsible for the MPAS framework, operators, and tools common to the applications; LANL has primary responsibility for the ocean model, and NCAR has primary responsibility for the atmospheric model.
The MPAS framework facilitates the rapid development and prototyping of models by providing infrastructure typically required by model developers, including high-level data types, communication routines, and I/O routines. By using MPAS, developers can leverage pre-existing code and focus more on development of their model.
This README is provided as a brief introduction to the MPAS framework. It does not provide details about each specific model, nor does it provide building instructions.
For information about building and running each core, please refer to each core's user's guide, which can be found at the following web sites:
Within the MPAS repository, code is laid out as follows. Sub-directories are only described below the src directory.
MPAS
└── src
├── registry -- Code for building Registry.xml parser (Shared)
├── driver -- Main driver for MPAS in stand-alone mode (Shared)
├── external -- External software for MPAS (Shared)
├── framework -- MPAS Framework (Includes DDT Descriptions, and shared routines. Shared)
├── operators -- MPAS Opeartors (Includes Operators for MPAS meshes. Shared)
├── inc -- Empty directory for include files that Registry generates (Shared)
└── core_* -- Individual model cores.
Model cores are typically developed independently. For information about building and running a particular core, please refer to that core's user's guide.