A GOTM simulation for any point in the world with only 2 clicks. Selecting a geographical position using Google Maps and clicking ‘Simulate’ will make an one year (2016) GOTM simulation with results presented in the browser.
Try it out here.
iGOTM is built around GOTM and a number of public datasets. After you pick a location, the server retrieves the water depth (from ETOPO1), meteorological conditions (ERA-Interim), initial temperature/salinity profiles (World Ocean Atlas) and tides (TPXO9). It then runs GOTM on our back-end servers to produce plots of temperature, salinity and diffusivity. All typically within 10 seconds.
The aim of this service is to show case the capabilities and performance of GOTM, the power of python-based tools for web interactivity, and not in the least, our company’s ability to build web services such as this. ;-)
Any two-click model comes with caveats. The main ones: (1) Regions strongly influenced by horizontal transports will not be simulated correctly as iGOTM lacks a mechanism to prescribe horizontal gradients or transports; this typically affects salinity in regions near rivers (salinity will drift). (2) Regions that are ice covered for part of the year will not be simulated correctly as GOTM lacks an ice model (instead of ice cover building up you’ll typically see strong mixing).
iGOTM currently allows you to simulate one year only (2016). This is a conscious decision to reduce the load on our servers. We will expand the service in the future with the ability to perform longer simulations (ideally the full ERA period, 1979-present) and to include biogeochemistry. Given the computational cost of these features, they will be made available as a paid, subscription-based service.
iGOTM uses nginx as frontend webserver. Nginx reverse proxies simulation tasks to tornado servers which are responsible for the actual GOTM simulation via a python wrapper around the Fortran based GOTM executable. Plots (created with Plotly) are fed back to Nginx for presentation.
iGOTM uses a secure connection using LetsEncrypt issued certificates.
All plots use the cmocean color maps.
Bug reports, questions, comments and suggestions are all welcome. Please send these to igotm@bolding-bruggeman.com.