IDL programming: How to design a simple program

For scientists and engineers, our scripts/programs are usually very straightforward and simple. Even some of us are modelers, our models should be complex but the source code are still manageable.
However, the re-usability of these simple programs are still necessary because a lot of our work must be done over and over again. For example, we need to plot/map some data in various scenarios. And we wants the plot/map program can be used for various types of inputs.

Specially, for IDL programming, there are a few common blocks that should be considered in a program.

Compiler option; this step is usually just for compiling setup, you can also specify it the start-up file.
Error control; some of the most important error information;
Global variable; this step should be used to define the global variable, such as the extension of a file.
Keyword check;
Local variable; this step should be project variable, such as data range.
Workspace; workspace usually refer to the directory all operations will be performance on.
Main: do the actual job.
Post; this is used to finish the program;
Cleanup; mainly for memory cleanup, (optional)

Another important tip is that do NOT try to finish everything within one program, especially for computationally intensive jobs.

I will provide an example soon.

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Spatial datasets operations: mask raster using region of interest

Climate change related studies usually involve spatial datasets extraction from a larger domain.
In this article, I will briefly discuss some potential issues and solutions.

In the most common scenario, we need to extract a raster file using a polygon based shapefile. And I will focus as an example.

In a typical desktop application such as ArcMap or ENVI, this is usually done with a tool called clip or extract using mask or ROI.

Before any analysis can be done, it is the best practice to project all datasets into the same projection.

If you are lucky enough, you may find that the polygon you will use actually matches up with the raster grid perfectly. But it rarely happens unless you created the shapefile using "fishnet" or other approaches.

What if luck is not with you? The algorithm within these tool usually will make the best estimate of the value based on the location. The nearest re-sample, but not limited to, will be used to calculate the value. But what about the outp…

Numerical simulation: ode/pde solver and spin-up

For Earth Science model development, I inevitably have to deal with ODE and PDE equations. I also have come across some discussion related to this topic, i.e.,

https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_does_one_mean_by_Model_Spin_Up_Time

In an attempt to answer this question, as well as redefine the problem I am dealing with, I decided to organize some materials to illustrate our current state on this topic.

Models are essentially equations. In Earth Science, these equations are usually ODE or PDE. So I want to discuss this from a mathematical perspective.

Ideally, we want to solve these ODE/PDE with initial condition (IC) and boundary condition (BC) using various numerical methods.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_value_problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_value_problem

Because of the nature of geology, everything is similar to its neighbors. So we can construct a system of equations which may have multiple equation for each single grid cell. Now we have an array of equation…

Watershed Delineation On A Hexagonal Mesh Grid: Part A

One of our recent publications is "Watershed Delineation On A Hexagonal Mesh Grid" published on Environmental Modeling and Software (link).
Here I want to provide some behind the scene details of this study.

(The figures are high resolution, you might need to zoom in to view.)

First, I'd like to introduce the motivation of this work. Many of us including me have done lots of watershed/catchment hydrology modeling. For example, one of my recent publications is a three-dimensional carbon-water cycle modeling work (link), which uses lots of watershed hydrology algorithms.
In principle, watershed hydrology should be applied to large spatial domain, even global scale. But why no one is doing it? I will use the popular USDA SWAT model as an example. Why no one is setting up a SWAT model globally?
There are several reasons we cannot use SWAT at global scale: We cannot produce a global DEM with a desired map projection. SWAT model relies on stream network, which depends on DEM.…

Earth Science

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