How to run the standalone fire model in WRF-SFIRE

The fire code in WRF-Fire, called SFIRE (for Spread FIRE model), can be used independently without WRF for testing. To make comparison easier, it can run from the same inputs as WRF-Fire.

Step by step instructions

• Download WRF-Fire and set the NETCDF environment variable as for building WRF-Fire

• cd wrf-fire/standalone

• Find a suitable make.inc.* file and soft-link it to make.inc, for example ln -s make.inc.gfortran make.inc

• Type make to create fire.exe.

• To run from the same inputs as WRF-Fire
  • Build WRF-Fire
  • Change to one of the test directories, for example cd ../WRFV3/test/em_fire/hill
  • Run ./ideal.exe to create the file wrfinput_d01
  • Run ./fire.exe

Testing

If you change anything in the files WRFV3/phys/module_fr_sfire_*.F, you must test that the changes do not break WRF-Fire, otherwise your changes will not be maintainable.

• Build WRF-Fire with SM+DM parallelism with debugging, and test all 4 versions (serial, SM, DM, SM+DM) with the examples provided in WRFV3/test/em_fire and various numbers of processors. The results (the wrfrst files) must be bit-identical to each other and identical to what they were before your changes.
• Build WRF-Fire with optimization and test on several platforms (at least gfortran and PGI).

Works with

1. REDIRECT Template:WRF-Fire-branch Aug 2 2010

• tested with gfortran 4.4 (gcc44 on Centos 5.5) and 4.3 (on OS X, from MacPorts), but will not compile under gfortran 4.1.2 (which is the default compiler distributed with RHEL5 and Centos 5.5) because of its lack of support of the Fortran 2003 standard
• PGI Fortran 10.5 and hopefully later

See also

• Fire model interface and standalone code description