Offline Mode: Implementation Guide

This page contains the implementation guide for the offline mode of PDAF. The implementation guide for the online mode, which uses a direct coupling of the model and PDAF is provided on a separate page. The differences between the online and offline modes is described on the page on the Implementation concept of PDAF.

The implementation of PDAF in offline mode

For the offline mode of data assimilation, the ensemble integrations by the numerical model are executed separately from the assimilation program, which computes the filter analysis step. Thus, the model code can remain unchanged in the offline mode. The calls to functions of PDAF are only contained in the assimilation program.

The implementation of the assimilation program for PDAF in offline mode can be performed in several steps. A possible sequence is the following:

1. Adaptation of the parallelization
2. Initialization of PDAF and the ensemble by PDAF_init
3. Implementation of the analysis step
4. Adding memory and timing information

The implementation steps are described on the pages linked above. An example of the implementation is given in the test suite provided with PDAF with the routines in testsuite/main/ and testsuite/offline_1D/. It should be possible to base you own implementation on this example by adding reading and writing routines for model files as well as adding the user-supplied routines for the handling of observations.

Several routines that contain model and observation specific operations are called by PDAF through its defined interface. These routines need to be implemented by the user. The operations in all these routines are rather elementary like filling the array of the ensemble of model states from model output files and the initialization of the vector of observations. The example mentioned above also includes examples for these routines. In addition, the directory templates/ contains template implementations of the routines that can be used as a basis for new implementations.