ParCAT: Parallel Climate Analysis Toolkit

Climate science is employing increasingly complex models and simulations to analyze the past and predict the future of Earth’s climate. This growth in complexity is creating a widening gap between the data being produced and the ability to analyze the datasets. Parallel computing tools are necessary to analyze, compare, and interpret the simulation data. The Parallel Climate Analysis Toolkit (ParCAT) provides basic tools to efficiently use parallel computing techniques to make analysis of these datasets manageable. The toolkit provides the ability to compute spatio-temporal means, differences between runs or differences between averages of runs, and histograms of the values in a data set. ParCAT is implemented as a command-line utility written in C. This allows for easy integration in other tools and allows for use in scripts. This also makes it possible to run ParCAT on many platforms – from laptops to supercomputers. ParCAT outputs NetCDF files so it is compatible with existing utilities such as Panoply and UV-CDAT. This paper describes ParCAT and presents results from some example runs on the Titan system at ORNL