Conventions

RTE+RRTMGP aspires to follow a set of coding conventions that may be useful in learning to use the code.

• Module names start with mo_, class/type names with ty_.
• Real variables are defined with working precision wp set in rte/mo_rte_kind.F90
• Most procedures in RTE+RRTMGP are functions which return a string. A non-empty string indicates an error of some kind.
• RTE and RRTMGP operate on multiple columns (profiles) at once. Problems are dimensioned by column, layer, and spectral quadrature point.
• RTE and RRTMGP are agnostic to vertical ordering
• Many classes use
  • init() routines to specify e.g. the spectral discretization
  • load() routines to provide data (e.g. lookup tables) needed to do a calculation
  • alloc() routines to allocate memory once the problem size is known
  • finalize() routines to reset variables to an un-initialized state
• Some classes have get_ncol() and get_nlay() methods to report the problem size
• Some classes have get_subset() methods to extract values along the column dimension
• Units are MKS

Most user-facing procedures are documented in this Wiki. Curious users can also inspect the public names in each class definition or see which routines are declared as public in individual modules.