Checking lateral boundary condiditions during restart

[arango]

All the lateral boundary conditions C-preprocessing options were removed and replaced in ROMS 3.6 with logical switches that are specified in standard input scripts. Currently, the only mechanism available for checking the lateral boundary conditions for consistency, in a particular application, is to decode the NetCDF global attribute NLM_LBC in the restart file. This is only possible with NetCDF files generated by ROMS 3.6 or higher. See ​release notes for more information.

The decoding of NLM_LBC global attribute is a little bit tricky and a problem was ​reported in the forum. I have not being able to reproduce this problem. However, this update makes the process more robust:

• The routine lbc_getatt was modified to initialize all the local character variables. The hope here is to avoid undesired characters in the native initialization by the compiler in a particular computer operating system. New logic is added to process the last variable entry in the global attribute.

• A new C-preprocessing option NO_LBC_ATT is introduced to avoid checking the lateral boundary conditions NetCDF global attribute NLM_LBC during restart in routine get_state.F. This will facilitate users to restart applications with files generated with older version of the code. It is the user RESPONSIBILITY to check the lateral boundary conditions specified in input scripts for consistency when the option NO_LBC_ATT is activated.