t-route is the routing framework developed by NOAA-OWP.
See Setting up t-route source for details on aquiring the t-route submodule. You will also need to set up pybind11 to use t-route.
Since t-route is set of Python modules, it will need to be installed in the Python environment ngen will be running with. Below are recommended steps to accomplish this:
- From the ngen project root (if this virtual environment exists, you may skip this step.)
python3 -m venv venv
- Activate the virtual environment and install/update a few prerequisites:
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -U pip deprecated pyarrow geopandas tables
Compile and install t-route following the instructions from the t-route repository. Ensure that you install the t-route modules in the virtual environment from step 2 of the Setup Virtual Environment section. The t-route source can be downloaded and placed anywhere, it is only important that the Python modules are installed in the right virtual environment.
The t-route compiler script, compiler.sh
, compiles and links C
and Fortran
code that will run within an ngen
process.
Ensure that compiler paths and flags, include paths, library paths, and other build time environment variables match the settings used to compile ngen
to avoid conflicting dependencies and undefined behavior.
Note, the t-route extension modules rely on netcdf fortran, and thus they need to be compiled with the same fortran compiler that compiled
the netcdf library. For example, if libnetcdff
was provided by the RHEL7 package netcdf-fortran-openmpi-static-4.2-16.el7.x86_64
which was compiled with the openmpi fortran compiler, you will have to set the FC
environment variable appropriately before executing the t-route compiler.sh
script, like so:
FC=mpif90 ./compiler.sh
The compiler.sh
script will install the Python modules with -e
. On macOS, you may need to re-install the modules in t-route's src
directory directly after running compiler.sh
.
Additional documentation for configuration and dependencies of t-route.
-
Create the build directory including the options to activate Python and Routing:
-
Activate Python flag with
-DNGEN_ACTIVATE_PYTHON:BOOL=ON
-
Activate Routing flag with
-DNGEN_ACTIVATE_ROUTING:BOOL=ON.
-
An example create build directory command with the above two options activated:
cmake -B cmake_build -DNGEN_ACTIVATE_PYTHON:BOOL=ON -DNGEN_ACTIVATE_ROUTING:BOOL=ON .
-
-
Unit tests for the Routing_Py_Adapter class can then be built and run from the main directory with the following two commands:
cmake --build cmake_build --target test_routing_pybind ./cmake-build-debug/test/test_routing_pybind
-
An example realization config with routing inputs.
To enable routing in a simulation realization config file, a routing
block should appear with a path to the t-route configuration file at the same level as the time
configuration, like so:
...
"time": {
"start_time": "2015-12-01 0:00:00",
"end_time": "2015-12-30 23:00:00",
"output_interval": 3600
},
"routing": {
"t_route_config_file_with_path": "./data/gauge_01073000/routing_config.yaml"
}
...
t-route uses a yaml input file for configuring the routing setup, see the t-route repo documentation for more information. An example configuration file is included in the example data.
Output from ngen is currently created on an hourly basis and in files per nexus, which is different from t-route's native processing expectations. To account for this, currently t-route preprocesses the ngen nexus output CSV files before running. To ensure this happens correctly, these settings must be correct in the configuration YAML:
# These examples assume a 720h (30 day) simulation:
forcing_parameters:
# t-route's internal timestep in seconds
dt : 300
# ngen's timestep divided by t-route's (e.g. 3600/300)
qts_subdivisions : 12
# total simulation t-route timesteps (e.g. 12 per hour, 288 per day)
nts : 8640
# number of external (ngen) timesteps
max_loop_size : 720
# The location to find the nex-* CSV files
qlat_input_folder : ./
nexus_input_folder : ./
# The glob pattern to match nexus output files - MUST NOT CHANGE!
qlat_file_pattern_filter : "nex-*"
nexus_file_pattern_filter : "nex-*"
# A directory where the temporary *.parquet files will be stored
binary_nexus_file_folder : /tmp
IMPORTANT: See the #known-issues below!
In some cases it may be useful to run the routing step separately. To do so, after installing t-route in your environment as described above, execute it directly this way:
python -m nwm_routing -V4 -f /path/to/routing_config.yaml
This is particularly useful if a long simulation completes in ngen but fails in t-route. Running routing this way will also often give more detailed error messages, if you are experiencing problems during the routing phase.
Running t-route with ngen nex-*.csv
input will generate hourly files with names matching *.parquet
in the directory specified by binary_nexus_file_folder
but it does not remove them after the simulation compeltes, and the presence of these files will prevent t-route from running. To run a simulation a second time, you will need to manually remove the created *.parquet
files.
It is not currently possible to use multiprocessing in t-route on macOS as part of an ngen simulation directly. To use routing on macOS, either:
- Run t-route in ngen with the
routing
block in the realization config and ensure that the t-route configuration specifiescpu_pool: 1
to disable multiprocessing,
OR
- Run t-route separately, after the ngen simulation as described above.
At present, running within ngen with cpu_pool
> 1 will result in spawning many additional ngen processes, consuming lots of resources and likely corrupting your output! See #505 .