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Getting started

This document will now explain you how to download Alpine3D, how to compile it according to your needs and how to find your way in its code and documentation.

Getting Alpine3D

In order to reduce the maintenance burden and to make Alpine3D easier to tailor to specific needs, it has been decomposed into several tools:

  • Inishell for graphical configuration of the simulations
  • MeteoIO for data retrieval and preprocessing
  • libsnowpack for doing the 1D soil/snow/canopy modeling
  • Alpine3D itself that combines MeteoIO and Snowpack, distributes it over a DEM and adds a radiation model and a snow drift model.

Precompiled Alpine3D

The Alpine3D releases that are found in the Downloads bundle MeteoIO, Snowpack and Alpine3D but NOT Inishell that has to be downloaded separately. They are available for Linux, Windows and osX and contain an HTML documentation (either in the start menu or in the share subfolder of the installation directory).

Alpine3D from source

If you recompile Alpine3D from sources, you need to download and install a few other of the package mentioned above. At the minimum, you need to have MeteoIO and libsnowpack on your system, compiled and preferably installed. Then follow the instructions given at compiling Alpine3D.

Running a simulation

It is highly recommended to setup your simulation in a specific directory. For example, a directory named "Dischma" that will have the following subdirectories structure:

  • bin; This is a copy (or a link) of the bin subdirectory of the Alpine3D sources
  • input; There you copy your meteo data in a "meteo" subdirectory (if needed), your domain grids in a "surface-grids" directory and the sno files in a "snowfiles" directory
  • output; The simulation outputs will be written there. You can create a "runoff" subdirectory to contain runoff data
  • output/grids; The gridded outputs could go there.
  • setup; The configuration files and start scripts should go there. The simulations will be started from this directory, using the run.sh launch script.

In order to prepare your simulation's data (forcing, grids, snow files), it is highly recommended to have a look at the Alpine3D's online documentation.

You can also have a look at the Running a simulation page in Alpine3D's documentation.

Running in parallel

For an openmp parallel run, you must run on an SMP system. For MPI, you must have the proper MPI libraries installed. Your queuing system (if any) must also support openmp/mpi and you must define how many threads you want to use for each run. This is handled by the run.sh launch script, but you must edit this script according to your needs.

If submitting the job to a cluster using the Sun Grid Engine queuing system, you must edit the header of your run.sh script to define your job name, queue name, number of nodes requested, etc