Software and support

The Atmospheric Chemistry Modelling Support Unit (ACMSU) provides atmospheric chemistry models, modelling programs, data and skills to the rest of the UK atmospheric science community. We have also written a number of software programs for use by the community and have an anonymous ftp server from which files and software can be downloaded (much of this is related to the UK Universities Global Atmospheric Modelling Programme; UGAMP).

Request further information regarding ACMSU support

Support Services

ACMSU provide a number of ongoing support services to the atmospheric community as well as the provision of software.

The ACMSU Trajectory Server provides trajectories for recent and ongoing field campaigns.

Field campaigns.

Technical support on the models and software we provide is also available. Please contact us for assistance.

Models available

UKCA. ACMSU are developing the new community chemistry-climate model UKCA in collaboration with the UK Met. O. and the Univ. of Leeds. For more details see our UKCA model page.

p-TOMCAT. ACMSU maintain and actively develop the Chemical Transport Model p-TOMCAT. This is a new parallel version of the TOMCAT model. This model is available for use by the community. For more details contact us.

We also have various chemical box models which we can make available on request.

Unified Model (UM) chemistry schemes

We provide support for different stratospheric UM modules (simple strat. chemistry, ASAD based comprehensive strat. chemistry, nudging of meteorological data and Kalman filtering). We also do some basic model testing and validation in conjunction with colleagues in Reading and elsewhere.

We also provide support for tropospheric chemistry schemes for the UM.

Software available

There are a variety of software packages available through the ACMSU. Some are only likely to be useful to other UGAMP groups. However, most software is probably of interest to the atmospheric modelling community. Note that not all of the software can be downloaded from our ftp server.

All software is provided 'as is'. We cannot guarantee to provide support but we would like to hear of any bugs you find.

ASAD - software for building and integrating atmospheric chemistry models

More details...

DELOAD

DELOAD has now been superceded by ASAD. We are no longer supporting or using DELOAD but it is still freely available.

DELOAD is a package for building chemistry integration software for use in modelling atmospheric chemistry. The user supplies ratefiles for bimolecular, trimolecular, photolysis and hetereogeneous reactions and the program then generates the necessary code.

The advantage of this is that the code is very easy to maintain, bug free (as long as DELOAD is!) and very rapid to change. The ACMSU have used DELOAD extensively to develop chemistry schemes for use their General Circulation Models (GCMs) and 3D off-line transport models.

DELOAD was written by Lida Nejad of UMIST. We have modified it for atmospheric chemistry.

In conjunction with this software, the ACMSU maintain a database of reactions relevent to atmospheric chemistry. DELOAD selects the reactions you require so you can develop a chemistry scheme based on a subset of these reactions. It is a role of the ACMSU to maintain this reaction database.

The following files are available:

DELOAD program

The DELOAD program and support utilities itself. This a compressed tarfile. Your Web browser program should uncompress it. To extract the files, you then need to execute the following UNIX command: tar xvf deload.tar. The program is written entirely in standard Fortran 77.

User Guide

This user guide is available describing the software and the ratefiles and how to use them. The document is in PostScript. It was written as a UGAMP Internal Report.

Rate and species files:

NB. ASAD ratefiles should be downloaded from the ASAD Home Page and not from here.

These should be checked from time to time as they will be updated.

Master species file: This is a list of all the species that appear in the rate files.
Bimolecular rate file: This is the master list of bimolecular reactions. The reactions are taken from UIPAC in the main, JPL otherwise.
Trimolecular rate file: This is the master list of trimolecular reactions.
Photolysis rate file: This is the master list of photolysis reactions.
Heterogeneous rate file: This is the master list of heterogeneous reactions.

Or you can connect to our ftp server to access the files that way, if you have problems.

Contour advection

Contour advection is useful in diagnosing atmospheric dynamics and air motion. In some senses it is a sophisticated parcel trajectory program. It is used to accurately follow a contour whilst it is stretched and distorted by the flow. Long filamentary structures can develop which show exactly where the air has gone.

Contour advection software has been developed by Warwick Norton (wan@atm.ox.ac.uk) as part of UGAMP. This software is available for use by others as part of GCMs or off-line transport.

There is a User Guide available, written as part of the UGAMP Internal Report series. There are quite a few files to collect, including Fortran 77 source code, IDL graphics plotting procedures and other utilities. There is a README file which gives details of all the files available. To get to the files, our anonymous ftp server will take you there.

Uplot - UGAMP Plotting Program

Uplot is the graphics program that is used in UGAMP to plot the data in the UGAMP Transfer File (UTF) format. It is an X11 based program with an easy to use GUI which uses the NCAR graphics software to do the plotting.

More details about Uplot here
FTP the Uplot binary from our anonymous ftp server

Uplot will be of little interest to anyone outside UGAMP unless they have UTFs to plot. Uplot is no longer being actively developed and we can't provide support in using it as it is unlikely to run with many of today's operating systems (it's that old!). We recommend using netCDF files and using one of GrADS or Ferret.