13. Coupling CROCO with other models

CROCO is coupled to atmospheric and wave models through the OASIS-MCT (Ocean-Atmosphere-Sea-Ice-Soil, Model Coupling Toolkit) coupler developed by CERFACS (Toulouse, France). This coupler allows the atmospheric, oceanic, and wave models to run at the same time in parallel, it exchanges variables, and performs grid interpolations and time transformations if requested. OASIS is not an executable file, but a set of libraries providing functions which are called in the models themselves. The variables exchanged by the coupler, as well as the grid interpolations are specified through a namelist file (called namcouple).

CROCO can therefore be coupled to any code in which OASIS-MCT is implemented. Non-exhaustively, here are some models including OASIS-MCT, that can be coupled to CROCO:

• WRF (Weather Research and Forecast model developed at NCAR, Boulder, USA)

• Meso-NH (Mesoscale Non-Hydrostatic model developed at Laboratoire d’Aérologie, Toulouse, France)

• WW3 (WaveWatch III model developed at NCEP, USA, and Ifremer, France)

• …

Those model are not provided for download with CROCO and need to be installed separately, as well as OASIS-MCT library.

A description of the OASIS-MCT features, its implementation in CROCO, WW3 and WRF codes, and the coupled variables that can be exchanged are given in the following.

Datailed step by step coupled tutorial is also available in the Tutorials section.

• 13.1. OASIS philosophy
  • 13.1.1. OASIS libraries
  • 13.1.2. Coupling sequence
  • 13.1.3. Restart files
  • 13.1.4. Interpolations
• 13.2. Detailed OASIS implementation
  • 13.2.1. In CROCO
  • 13.2.2. In WW3
  • 13.2.3. In WRF
• 13.3. Coupled variables
  • 13.3.1. Coupling with an atmospheric model
  • 13.3.2. Coupling with a wave model
  • 13.3.3. Coupling atmosphere and wave models
  • 13.3.4. Note on momentum flux when coupling 3 models
  • 13.3.5. Note on coupling with AGRIF
• 13.4. Grids
  • 13.4.1. OASIS grid files
  • 13.4.2. Multiple model grids (nesting case)

Related CPP options:

OW_COUPLING	Activate Ocean-Wave coupling
OA_COUPLING	Activate Ocean-Atmosphere coupling
OA_MCT	Use OASIS-MCT for coupling

Preselected options:

#undef OA_COUPLING
#undef OW_COUPLING