The distributed CMAQ user interface consists of a series of C-shell scripts for building and running the different CMAQ programs on Linux operating systems. These scripts can be adapted to work with any Unix shell scripting language (e.g. Bash, Bourne, etc.) and function primarily to set a series of environment variables required by M3BLD or the CMAQ program executables. Manipulating the CMAQ scripts requires the use of a Unix text editor such as vi (http://www.vim.org/) or nedit (http://www.nedit.org/). Alternatives to Unix shell scripts exist in prototype CMAQ graphical users interfaces (GUI) with the Multimedia Integrated Modeling System (MIMS) and the CMAQ GUI, both available through the CMAS Center (http://www.cmascenter.org).
There are three basic User Interfaces for CMAQ; the CMAQ C-shell scripts (the distributed user interface), the CMAQ Graphical User Interface (GUI), and the CMAQ Unified Archive. The C-shell scripts and the Unified Archive are both text-based UNIX interfaces in which CMAQ is configured and compiled by editing the scripts. These scripts can be adapted to work with any Unix shell scripting language (e.g. Bash, Bourne, etc.) and function primarily to set a series of environment variables required by M3BLD or the CMAQ program executables. Manipulating the CMAQ scripts requires the use of a Unix text editor such as vi (http://www.vim.org/) or nedit (http://www.nedit.org/). Alternatives to Unix shell scripts exist in prototype CMAQ graphical users interfaces (GUI) with the Multimedia Integrated Modeling System (MIMS) and the CMAQ GUI, both available through the CMAS Center (http://www.cmascenter.org). The CMAQ GUI is a java based program that is designed to download, compile, configure, and run CMAQ all through its interface. All three interfaces are available for download at the CMAS center website, www.cmascenter.org. The CMAS Center currently fully supports CMAQ on Linux systems using the Portland Group compiler; there is limited support for compiling and running CMAQ on other UNIX computing systems.
The CMAQ C-shell scripts are available in separate tar files on the CMAS Center website. The MODELS file contains all of the source code for CMAQ and the SCRIPTS file contains all of scripts for building and executing the individual programs. Each of CMAQ’s programs has a separate build script and a separate run script. The build script is used to compile the program and the run script is used to set the required environment variables and run the program. You can edit the build script and the run script using a text editor such as the vi editor. There are certain options that need to be set at compilation and some that can be set before running a simulation. All changes must be done by editing the individual scripts for each program. There are also previous releases of CMAQ available for download at the CMAS Center website. Details about using the scripts to build and run CMAQ are described in Chapter 3, CMAQ System Requirements and Installation.