Regions

The [regions] section of a configuration file contains options related to regions either defined in MPAS components’ online analysis or determined within MPAS-Analysis using region mask files:

[regions]
## options related to ocean regions used in several analysis modules

# list of region names (needs to be in the same order as region indices in
# time-series stats)
regions = ['arctic', 'equatorial', 'so', 'nino3', 'nino4', 'nino3.4', 'global']
# list of plot titles (needs to be in the same order as region indices in
# time-series stats)
plotTitles = ['Arctic', 'Equatorial (15S-15N)', 'Southern Ocean', 'Nino 3',
              'Nino 4', 'Nino 3.4', 'Global Ocean']

Region Names

MPAS-Ocean currently has hard coded into its online analysis 7 regions in a fixed order, as given in the regions option. This should not be altered unless corresponding changes to the MPAS-Ocean code have been made.

The corresponding plotTitles can be modified as desired to update how these regions are named in plot titles and in gallery names on the resulting web page.

Region Mask Files

Currently, three analysis tasks (streamfunctionMOC, timeSeriesAntarcticMelt and oceanRegionalProfiles) use masks that define regions in an MPAS mesh as part of their analysis. The option regionMaskSubdirectory specifies the path to these mask files, typically diagnostics/mpas_analysis/region_masks. Region masks for common MPAS Ocean and Seaice grids are supplied as part of the data from the E3SM public data repository (see the Quick Start Guide).

If ice shelf, ocean basin, Antarctic or Arctic masks for a given grid don’t already exist in the cached mask location, they will be generated automatically from the associated geojson files (iceShelves20200621.geojson oceanBasins20200621.geojson, antarcticRegions20200621.geojson, or arcticRegions.geojson), a process that can be time consuming for large meshes. To generate them in advance (using threading to speed up the process), see the example utility script utility_scripts/make_region_mask.py