Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS)

License

Copyright (c) 2002-2025 The ROMS Group

Overview

ROMS solves the free-surface, hydrostatic, flux form of the primitive equations over variable bathymetry using stretched terrain following in the vertical and orthogonal curvilinear coordinates in the horizontal. The finite volume grid is discretized on a staggered Arakawa C-grid. Detailed information about its governing equations, numerical discretization, algorithms, usage, and tutorials is available in the WikiROMS documentation portal at www.myroms.org/wiki.

The dynamical kernel of ROMS is comprised of four separate models, including the nonlinear (NLM), perturbation tangent linear (TLM), finite amplitude tangent linear (RPM), and adjoint (ADM). They are located in the Nonlinear, Tangent, Representer, and Adjoint sub-directories, respectively. The TLM and ADM were hand-coded from the discrete NLM code using the recipes of Giering and Kaminski (1998). Therefore, any change to its dynamical and numerical kernels will affect the symmetry of the TLM and ADM operators. The discrete adjoint is exact and is defined relative to the inner product that prescribes the L2-norm.

This official community version of ROMS is developed and maintained at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA. Currently, this git repository contains the following branches:

• main: Tagged versions and the latest stable release version of ROMS
• develop: Main developing branch of ROMS. It contains the model's latest corrections, updates, and minor evolutions. It is a stable branch that passes selected internal tests. It is the parent to other feature branches describing new options and algorithms.
• feature branches: Research and new development branches recommended to superusers and beta testers.

Check wiki for more information:

https://github.com/myroms/roms/wiki https://github.com/myroms/roms/wiki/ROMS-Branches

Instructions

The ROMS framework is intended for users interested in ocean modeling. It requires an extensive background in ocean dynamics, numerical modeling, and computers to configure, run, and analyze the results to ensure you get the correct solution for your application. Therefore, we highly recommend users register at https://www.myroms.org and set up a username and password to access the ROMS forum, email notifications for bugs/updates, technical support from the community, trac code maintenance history, tutorials, workshops, and publications. The user's ROMS forum has over 24,000 posts with helpful information. Technical support is limited to registered users. We do not provide user technical support, usage, or answers in GitHub.

This GitHub version becomes the official git repository for downloading, updating, improving, and correcting defects/bugs to the ROMS source code. Also, it is the version used in the ROMS-JEDI interface hosted at https://github.com/JCSDA-internal, which is currently private. Use the following command to download the ROMS source code:

``` make git clone https://github.com/myroms/roms.git (default) git clone https://github.com/myroms/roms.git

```

The idealized and realistic ROMS Test Cases and the Matlab processing software can be downloaded from:

make git clone https://github.com/myroms/roms_test.git git clone https://github.com/myroms/roms_matlab.git We highly recommend that Users define the ROMS_ROOT_DIR variable in their computer shell logging environment, specifying where the User cloned/downloaded the ROMS source code, Test Cases, and Matlab processing software: setenv ROMS_ROOT_DIR MyDownlodLocationDirectory The build scripts will use this environmental variable when compiling any of the ROMS Test Cases without the need to customize the location of the ROMS source code. Also, it is used for loading the path of Matlab scripts in the startup.m configuration file.

The doxygen version of ROMS is available at: https://www.myroms.org/doxygen Registered users of ROMS have access to:

• ROMS User's Forum for technical support from the community: https://www.myroms.org/forum
• ROMS Trac source code maintenance and evolution: https://www.myroms.org/projects/src
• WikiROMS documentation and tutorials plus editing: https://www.myroms.org/wiki