Introduction

LADiM is the acronym of the Lagrangian Advection and DIffusion Model.

It is an offline ocean particle tracking model. Presently it takes input from the ROMS ocean model.

This is the third incarnation of the LADiM model at the Institute of Marine Research. The first worked with a version of the Feltfile format used with the Princeton Ocean Model. The second version targeted NetCDF output from the ROMS model. Both these versions were written in Fortran. The new code is written in python (python 3 only). Parts of the code may in future be rewritten in other languages for increased performance.

The old fortran codes had drifted apart without any kind of version control and minimal documentation. Maintenance became increasingly more difficult. The rationale for a new incarnation is to have a well-documented model system under version control. The design should be modular so it can easily be extended to other ocean models and applications.

The model code is available under the MIT license, and is hosted on github, https://github.com/bjornaa/ladim. This documentation is hosted on Read the Docs. A pdf version is also available.