Introduction

ICAR is a simplified atmospheric model designed primarily for climate downscaling, atmospheric sensitivity tests, and hopefully educational uses. At this early stage, the model is still undergoing rapid development, and users are encouraged to get updates frequently.

Running_ICAR

To run the model 3D time-varying atmospheric data are required, though an ideal test case can be generated for simple simulations as well. There are some sample python scripts to help make input forcing files, but the WRF pre-processing system can also be used. Low-resolution WRF output files can be used directly, various reanalysis and GCM output files can be used with minimal pre-processing (just get all the variables in the same netcdf file.) In addition, a high-resolution netCDF topography file is required. This will define the grid that ICAR will run on. Finally an ICAR options file is used to specify various parameters for the model. A sample options file is provided in the run/ directory.

Developing

This document provides the primary API and code structure documentation. The code is based on github.com/NCAR/icar Developers are encouraged to fork the main git repository and maintain their own git repository from which to issue pull requests.

Reference

Gutmann, E. D., I. Barstad, M. P. Clark, J. R. Arnold, and R. M. Rasmussen (2016), The Intermediate Complexity Atmospheric Research Model, J. Hydrometeor, doi:10.1175/JHM-D-15-0155.1.