Worf (Chemistry)

I'm preparing for my trip to Boulder next Monday by attempting to run a different model: WRF-CHEM (Weather Research and Forecasting model, with chemistry). It can focus with much higher resolution (even down to a few meters) than the model I am currently using (the National Center for Atmospheric Research's CCSM (Community Climate Systems Model) ), which has a resolution on the order of a few hundred kilometers, at best.

Once again, I find myself venturing into programming territory that is confusing, frustrating, and occasionally rewarding. I've been installing and configuring WRF for about an hour, when I ran into a roadblock: I didn't know what compiler I've been using, which type of computer I've been connecting to, and which particular run option to choose to ensure the successful operation of WRF. Luckily, I have Dan, sitting two desks to my left in an otherwise empty cubicle (it can hold up to 5 people, but three of the desks are currently empty). He's been doing this stuff for almost as long as I've been alive, and he's tremendously helpful. The answers to the above questions, by the way, are a gfortran compiler, a x86_64 Linux machine, and option #15.

So while I'm waiting for WRF to optimize...or compile...or both, I took a snapshot of my desktop as an example:


I have two monitors (well, a laptop and an external monitor), which is why the picture is so wide. You can see my pretty background, my chats (Hi Hnin and Toni!) and the xterminal that is currently struggling to compile. I'm working my way through this tutorial so that I'll have some idea of what's going on when I arrive in Boulder.

I often feel like I'm struggling to have some idea of what's going on around me. I rarely feel like I have a complete grasp on things, and every time I do feel like I understand, something new and confusing pops up. It's an exiting life, well, comparatively. I'm not scuba-diving for a living, but I'm also not performing banal tasks day after day. I learn something almost hourly, and on some days make huge leaps in productivity. Other days (e.g. today) are slow, with tiny little baby-steps of productivity.

I'm going to go do some reading until this thing finishes compiling.

. . .

It finished (after an hour), but it looks like I ran a real case, instead of an ideal case (which is what the tutorial called for). I'll have to go back and clean it up and run an ideal case. I also didn't pipe the output to a log file, which I will do now.

. . .

And now I'm running into Fortran library problems. It seemed to compile just fine, but when I tried to run the executable file, I get some error about unfindable Fortran libraries. I may be running this on the wrong computer...I just emailed my adviser to ask for some advice on this. Whoa, he got back quickly. I'm doing this on the wrong computer.