Grid Development and Editing

A mesh in the form of a fort.14 file is required to run ADCIRC. This page presents basic info on options available to mesh construction end editing. For information on viewing meshes or other ADCIRC data, see Visualization. In many cases, a mesh may already exist to suite one’s needs. Given the complexities and challenges associated with mesh construction, users should carefully weigh the merits of using an existing mesh, revising an existing mesh, or building a new one.

Tools for ADCIRC Meshing

SMS

SMS is a commercial Windows-based graphical program for creating, editing, viewing, and running various models, including ADCIRC. It is popular with ADCIRC users due to its features and support for ADCIRC file formats. More information is available from Aquaveo here and here.

OceanMesh2D

Completely open source (GNU GPLv3.0) MATLAB-based software for automated triangular mesh generation. The latest version is available from https://github.com/CHLNDDEV/OceanMesh2D [1] [2] [3].

It can be used as an end-to-end pre-processor for ADCIRC, including:

  • Generating the mesh.

  • Checking for and editing the mesh to satisfy Courant constraints.

  • Generating fort.13 file attributes.

  • Generating fort.15 file, including automatic generation of tidal potential information and tidal elevation boundary conditions.

  • Generating other input files such as fort.24 file.

  • Storing the mesh and its attributes into a msh class container that can be saved as an efficient .mat binary.

  • Plotting the mesh and its attributes using the generalized plot command.

  • Writing the from the msh class container into the ASCII fort.xx input files.

References