Page 229 - Fundamentals of Ocean Renewable Energy Generating Electricity From The Sea

218 Fundamentals of Ocean Renewable Energy

One of the key advantages of Matlab is that it is widely used by ocean
modellers around the world; hence many existing scripts can be shared and
2
downloaded. For example, Mathworks File Exchange is a forum for find-
ing and sharing custom Matlab applications, classes, code examples, drivers,
functions, and scripts, many of which will be useful for model preprocessing
and postprocessing. In addition, various researchers have written preprocessing
and postprocessing tool boxes in Matlab for some of the most popular ocean
3
models, for example, ROMSTOOLS for setting up and analysing the outputs
4
of ROMS simulations, and OpenEarth tools for setting up and analysing the
outputs of the SWAN wave model. Further, many excellent packages have been
written and are freely available for Matlab, such as the popular t_tide (tidal
harmonic analysis) and m_map (mapping toolbox, which has been used to
generate Fig. 8.3, for example). Matlab is preinstalled with netCDF libraries—
a self-describing file format that is popular for storing numerical model inputs
and outputs. Because Matlab is based on the principal of matrices, it excels at
setting up and analysing structured grids. However, for unstructured meshes, an
alternative software package is recommended—Blue Kenue.

8.6.2 Blue Kenue

Blue Kenue is a freely available preprocessing, analysis, and visualization tool
that is suitable for a wide range of model applications, and in particular mesh
generation for FEM or FVM models. The interface is very intuitive and easy
to use (Fig. 8.15), and Blue Kenue is setup to directly import/export data from/

FIG. 8.15 Blue Kenue environment.

2. See https://uk.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/.
3. See http://www.croco-ocean.org/download/roms_agrif-project/.
4. See https://svn.oss.deltares.nl/repos/openearthtools/trunk/matlab/applications/swan/.