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:

git clone https://github.com/myroms/roms.git                 (default)
git clone https://github.com/myroms/roms.git <source_dir>

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

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