Oops, this was an accident!!! I was experimenting with the SHOREFACE application to understand the 270 degree shift in my private branch. I was looking if the shift was in the physical direction of the waves. I didn't checked a curvilinear application which may complicates the directional shift. The original code was correct. I almost gave John an aneurysm... Sorry for that.
I forgot to change back the commented two lines in my private branch and this got propagated in my automatic updates of all repositories. Then, to make it worse I made and svn commit without specified the files that I wanted to change. This did all of them. I can happens. I just screw-up. The changes in src:ticket:404 to wrt_his.F were correct. The scale to those particular output fields was wrong and needs to be 1.0_r8.