README

V0.5 - 2013/03/06.

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* GENERAL DESCRIPTION

PSOM, pronounced "soam" (the nectar derived from the churning of the oceans in Indian mythology), stands for Process Study Ocean Model. 
It is a versatile, three-dimensional, non-hydrostatic, computational fluid dynamical model for oceanographic (as well as other) applications (Mahadevan et al., 1996a,b). 
The model uses the finite volume method on a structured grid with boundary fitted coordinates (topography conforming sigma grid in the vertical, and boundary conforming in the horizontal). 
The model has a free-surface. It can be used for large- and small-scale phenomena and can be run in hydrostatic or non-hydrostatic mode (Mahadevan, 2006). It uses a highly efficient solution procedure that exploits the skewness arising from the small geometrical aspect (depth to length scale) ratio of the ocean to speed up the solution of the non-hydrostatic pressure, which is solved by the multigrid method. 

The model has been used for a number of process studies, including investigation of the vertical transport of nutrients for phytoplankton production (Mahadevan and Archer, 2000) and the dynamics of submesoscale processes (Mahadevan and Tandon, 2006; Mahadevan, Tandon and Ferrari, 2010). Since the non-hydrostatic model is well-posed with open boundaries, it can be used as a nested high-resolution model with time-varying boundary conditions applied from a coarser resolution general circulation model (Mahadevan and Archer, 1998). The model is thus ideally suited for high-resolution, limited-region modeling studies. 


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* DIRECTIONS TO INSTALL THE MODEL

- Download the code by clicking on "ZIP" just to the left of the repository URL field.
- Once the file is dowloaded, unzip it: a directory, with a name like " V0.5-master ", should be created.
- You can move this directory anywhere you like.
- Go to this " V0.5-master/code " directory and follow the instructions detailed in the file " GET_STARTED_1 ".