Hint for using WRF-HDF5 IO modules

1. External libraries for HDF5

HDF5 supports in-memory data compression. Currently  two compression packages are available to be used inside HDF5. One is zlib(or called gzip) which implemented deflate compression algorithm and this library is open source and can be found in almost any UNIX/LINUX system. Another one is SZIP. SZIP is a compression especially for scientific data. However, SZIP is not an open-source compression package. There are some license restriction for using SZIP. In summary, SZIP decoder is free but SZIP encoder needs a license under certain circumstance. Please go to http://hdfgroup.org/doc_resource/SZIP/ for more information.

HDF5 distributes binaries with SZIP encoder and without SZIP encoder. So for WRF-HDF5 users, you need to make sure that you have the appropriate SZIP library to be installed.

You may need to modify the SZIP path at your configure.wrf file.

Search the string "-lsz", then modify the previous string with "-L/.../.../lib" to the SZIP library you installed.

2. 64-bit issue

If you want to use 64-bit HDF5 library and WRF, the following setting may give you some hints:

setenv OBJECT_MODE 64

For compiling flag FCOPTIM: adding -q64

For Linking flag LDFLAGS: adding -b64