Fang:

I have talked w/ GangLu about your request, and now
understand that you need to look at fields that are
not saved on the tgcm histories, e.g., joule heating, 
field-aligned currents, etc. You cannot use the netcdf 
idl code I mentioned earlier to view these fields.

Because these are fields that are *not* saved on the tgcm
histories, they must be calculated and saved from a model 
run.  To save these data from a model run we write xdr 
("transparent data representation") files from the 
model, then read the xdr files with IDL.

The IDL application is called animxdr because I initially
wrote it to make animations from model runs. I have
made a tar file of the idl source for animxdr and put it
in the ftp area of the machine hao.ucar.edu.  The file is 
in the /pub/foster directory and is called animxdr.tar. 
You can get it via anonymous ftp.

In the same ftp directory (/pub/foster) there is a file
called qwind.xdr. Get this file w/ ftp in binary mode.
Use this as a test file with animxdr. It is from GangLu,
and contains 144 frames of joule heating due to neutral
winds.

Once you get the animxdr.tar file, extract the files
into a new directory where you want to store the source.
("tar xf animxdr.tar"). There should be several .pro files, 
a single .h file, and an animxdr file. The latter is a csh 
executable. Edit that file and change the env var specifying
the path to the source (TGCMIDL_DIR) to your installation
directory where you have put the source. (You might want to
put the animxdr script in a bin directory under your home).

Then make a separate animxdr directory under your home,
(e.g. ~/animxdr), and execute animxdr from there. Copy 
the startup.pro file from the install dir. You may want to
edit the startup.pro file later, according to the comments.
Make sure the directory where you put the animxdr script is 
in your PATH env var, and execute it from your ~/animxdr 
directory.  The animxdr script starts idl, compiles the source,
and starts the application. You should get a GUI window
on the screen from which you can input the qwind.xdr file
and make animations, etc. 

If you have trouble getting animxdr to run on your machine,
maybe there is someone in your department that is familiar
w/ idl installation on your machines that could help you.
It would be best to do all this from a unix machine on which
you are running the c-shell (csh).

Once you get animxdr working w/ GangLu's qwind.xdr file,
we can talk further about how to save xdr files from your
version of the model (the xdr library will need to be available
on the machine on which you run the model).

--Ben

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Ben Foster		      	High Altitude Observatory (HAO)
foster@ncar.ucar.edu		phone: 303-497-1595  fax: 303-497-1589  
Nat. Center for Atmos. Res.     P.O. Box 3000 Boulder CO 80307 USA
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