Skip to content

Home

Jump to bottom Edit New page
Ricardo Torres edited this page May 23, 2023 · 7 revisions

FVCOM

FVCOM is a prognostic, unstructured-grid, finite-volume, free-surface, 3-D primitive equation coastal ocean circulation model developed by UMASSD-WHOI joint efforts.

The model consists of momentum, continuity, temperature, salinity and density equations and is closed physically and mathematically using turbulence closure submodels. The horizontal grid is comprised of unstructured triangular cells and the irregular bottom is preseented using generalized terrain-following coordinates.

The General Ocean Turbulent Model (GOTM) developed by Burchard’s research group in Germany (Burchard, 2002) has been added to FVCOM to provide optional vertical turbulent closure schemes. FVCOM is solved numerically by a second-order accurate discrete flux calculation in the integral form of the governing equations over an unstructured triangular grid. This approach combines the best features of finite-element methods (grid flexibility) and finite-difference methods (numerical efficiency and code simplicity) and provides a much better numerical representation of both local and global momentum, mass, salt, heat, and tracer conservation.

The ability of FVCOM to accurately solve scalar conservation equations in addition to the topological flexibility provided by unstructured meshes and the simplicity of the coding structure has make FVCOM ideally suited for many coastal and interdisciplinary scientific applications.

Many of the examples and procedures described in this wiki have been the contribution of mostly PML employees and reflect our learning journey. As such, they are not intended to be comprehsenive. Contributions from other parties are acknowledged in their respective sections.

While the vast majority of the examples use Matlab code from the fvcom-toolbox, at PML we have been using PyFVCOM since 2019. We will update the wiki to reflect usage of the new resource as time permits. If you want to contribute feel free to contact us!

Tools

  • VisIt - a free interactive parallel visualization and graphical analysis tool for viewing scientific data on Unix and PC platforms
  • fvcom-toolbox - a MATLAB toolbox for generating FVCOM input files and processing output files
  • SMS - proprietary Windows software to generate unstructured grids for use in FVCOM
  • PyFVCOM - an ever-growing toolbox of tools in Python to read FVCOM model outputs and perform FVCOM post-processing
  • PySeidon - a Python post-processing library which performs a number of analyses (e.g. harmonic analysis) of FVCOM outputs.
  • MATLAB - An example MATLAB script for plotting FVCOM output

Data Sets

The pages below outline some useful data sets which have been used with FVCOM. This includes instructions on how to use the FVCOM matlab toolbox to obtain and process these data.

FVCOM Workshops

Archived presentations and notes from previous workshops.

Users contributions corner

Users share here their experiences and work flows to setup and run a domain. These range from idealised setups accessible through the gitlab repository to real life implementations

For questions regarding FVCOM, to contribute to the wiki please subscribe to the mailing list uk-fvcom mailing list If you would like to cite FVCOM, please refer to its main publication and/or URLs.

Background

=== FVCOM Wiki ===

  1. Introduction

User guide

  1. Getting FVCOM

  2. Building and installing

  3. Grid considerations

  4. Setting up a simulation

  5. Additional information of less frequent usage in no particular order

    1. Output of subdomains
    2. Use of Probes
    3. Read the code
    4. Tips and tricks
    5. Semi-implicit considerations

How to cite
Licensing and copyright
Acknowledgements Policy

Build and test DOI

Clone this wiki locally