GEOS-Chem Online User's Guide
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4. GEOS-Chem Shared Data Directories
4.1 Overview
The GEOS-Chem shared data directories contain the various meteorological fields, emission inventories, scale factors, and other data that GEOS-Chem reads in during the course of a simulation.
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If you are using the Amazon EC2 cloud: The GEOS-Chem shared data directories are automatically synced to the Amazon S3 storage system. You can easily access this data from the home directory of your Amazon EC2 cloud instance. For more information, please see our comprehensive cloud computing tutorial: cloud.geos-chem.org.
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If you are using your institution's computer system: You (or your IT staff) will have to download the meteorological fields and emissions data that are used to drive GEOS-Chem. Please proceed to Section 4.2.
4.2 Downloading data to your local computer system
Because of the large volume of data, you must download the shared data directories via FTP or a similar utility such as wget, FireFTP, or SecureFX. Tracking the shared data directory structure with Git is impossible due to its size. See the Minimum system requirements for GEOS-Chem wiki page for information on typical disk space requirements for GEOS-Chem.
If your research group is setting up GEOS-Chem for the first time: You (or your IT staff) will only have to download the full set of the GEOS-Chem shared data directories once. As new emissions inventories and met field files become available, you can download the new files or directories individually on an as-needed basis.
If your research group already consists of several GEOS-Chem users: The GEOS-Chem shared directory structure should already be stored in a common disk space on your computer cluster. In this case, you (or your IT staff) will only need to download the new emissions inventories and related data files that were introduced in this version.
For detailed instructions on downloading the shared data directories, please see the following wiki page subsections:
| Directory Type | Wiki Resource |
|---|---|
| Shared data directories | |
| Emissions files used by HEMCO | |
| Sample restart files that you can use to spin up your own GEOS-Chem simulations |
Important Note! Alll shared data directories are now subdirectories of a single root directory called ExtData. If downloading the shared data directories for the first time, you (or IT staff) must set up the ExtData directory prior to running GEOS-Chem. If you have previously downloaded the GEOS-Chem shared data directories, you can simply add symbolic links from ExtData to the existing data directories. Please see the Setting up the ExtData directory wiki page for detailed instructions on setting up your shared data directories so that they are compatible with GEOS-Chem.