Diagnostic tools for 3D unstructured oceanographic data

Abstract

Most ocean models in current use are built upon structured meshes. It follows that most existing tools for extracting diagnostic quantities (volume and surface integrals, for example) from ocean model output are constructed using techniques and software tools which assume structured meshes. The greater complexity inherent in unstructured meshes (especially fully unstructured grids which are unstructured in the vertical as well as the horizontal direction) has left some oceanographers, accustomed to traditional methods, unclear on how to calculate diagnostics on these meshes. In this paper we show that tools for extracting diagnostic data from the new generation of unstructured ocean models can be constructed with relative ease using open source software. Higher level languages such as Python, in conjunction with packages such as NumPy, SciPy, VTK and MayaVi, provide many of the high-level primitives needed to perform 3D visualisation and evaluate diagnostic quantities, e.g. density fluxes. We demonstrate this in the particular case of calculating flux of vector fields through isosurfaces, using flow data obtained from the unstructured mesh finite element ocean code ICOM, however this tool can be applied to model output from any unstructured grid ocean code.