4.6.3. M3DIFF

The M3DIFF program performs comparison (and other) operations on pairs of variables from a user-specified pair of GRIDDED I/O API files and computes statistics for each specified variable and for the specified “difference” operation. An I/O API output file containing all the results of the specified operations can be optionally generated for viewing within scientific visualization tools.


setenv  <infile A>   <path name> 

setenv  <infile B>   <path name>

setenv  <reportfile> <path name>

m3diff [<infile A> <infile B> [<reportfile>]] [<DEFAULT>]

The default statistical analysis is a tabular listing (by time period) of the maximum value, minimum value, mean value, and the standard deviation of the 2 datasets. Several other calculations are also available:

Pointwise difference: a-b
Pointwise difference: b-a
Pointwise ratio: a/b
Pointwise ratio: b/a
Pointwise absolute value of difference: |a-b|
Difference normalized by 1st grid: (a-b)/a
Difference normalized by 2nd grid: (a-b)/b
Difference normalized by 2nd grid: (b-a)/b
Absolute value of difference normalized by A: |a-b|/a
Absolute value of difference normalized by B: |a-b|/b
Difference normalized by pointwise mean: (a-b)/0.5(a+b)
Difference normalized by pointwise mean: (b-a)/0.5(a+b)
Difference normalized by joint root mean square: (a-b)/RMS(a&b)
Difference normalized by joint root mean square: (b-a)/RMS(a&b)
Pointwise sum a+b
Pointwise maximum max(a,b)
Pointwise minimum min(a,b)