CarbonDrift GUI Manual

An even simpler way to run and visualize a CarbonDrift simulation is to use the graphical user interface. However, this is harder to debug, if an error was to occur.

To start the gui, simply run the following command in the terminal 

                CD_gui

A gui window will open:

Preparing a Simulation

To run a simulation we must first provide the required data and specify some parameters. We do this as follows:

  1. Import the seeding information. We can achieve this by either
    1. Importing the data from a pickle file (see seeding). Click on the browse files button in the Seed from existing file section, locate the file, open it and click SEED.
    1. Creating a new seed with a uniform initial carbon flux over each biome. Specify the domain, phlyum, and type of sinking material. Here, M stands for caracasses whereas Eg is egestion. The other fields, which specify paths to certain data files, can be left as defaults, unless one wishes to use his own specific data files.
  1. Import required and optional readers. The required readers include a temperature field and a bathymetry field. The current velocity field, for example is an optional reader.
  1. Define configures for the OceanDrift module (see OceanDrift config). The example bellow shows a configuration in which the x sea water velocity fallback value is set to 1, which will result in a constant eastward drift, if no velocity field reader is provided.
  1. Specify simulation parameters. First select the simulation type. If you choose grid, you must also specify the split factor. Next, if you would like to activate horizontal advection and fragmentation tick the checkboxes. If fragmentation is selected, provide the fragmentation condition (see fragmentation). Next specify the start time, time step, output time step and number of simulation steps. Choose a model type, by selecting a constant or variable sinking velocity, exponential or linear decay rate and mass-dependent or area-dependent decay. Finally, specify the initial value for the sinking velocity in m/s, select the variables, which will be stored to an output file and select the output file location. Click on the INITIALIZE button.

Running a Simulation

If the initialization was successful, the simulation can be started by navigating to the Run Simulation tab and clicking RUN. The simulation output log will update within the window and a progress bar will appear.

Plotting a Simulation

Once the simulation is complete, we can visualize it by navigating to the Plot Simulation tab. Alternatively, we could have also skipped the previous steps and started plotting immediately, if the simulation had already been made and saved.

First, select the method of visualization. For output examples and different parameter explanations refer to examples and parameter list. If the diff checkbox is ticked, upload the simulations, which should be subtracted from the other simulations, by importing them via the upload simulations with minus sign button.