Table of Contents - The Atmospheric Studies Group at TRC

Section 9: CALPUFF
options, output options, etc.). CALPUFF.INP may be created/edited directly using a conventional editor,
or it may be created/edited indirectly by means of the PC-based, Windows-compatible Graphical User
Interface (GUI) developed for CALPUFF.
The CALPUFF GUI not only prepares the control file, it also executes the model and facilitates file
management functions; and it contains an extensive help system that makes much of the information in
this manual available to the user on-line. When using the GUI, the source data and receptor information
required for a CALPUFF run can be entered through the edit screens or read from external ASCII files
(spreadsheet-compatible). Each source type (points, areas, volumes, and lines) contains an external
ASCII file format description and sample file in the help system.
Although the model can be set up and run entirely within the GUI system, the interface is designed to
always create the ASCII CALPUFF.INP file. This allows runs to be set up on PC-based systems and the
control file transferred to a workstation or a mainframe computer for computationally intensive
applications. The ASCII CALPUFF.INP file should be directly transportable to virtually any non-PC
system.
When CALPUFF is setup and run entirely on a non-PC system, or if the GUI is not used on a PC, the
control file CALPUFF.INP may be configured by using a conventional editor. This is facilitated by the
extensive self-documenting statements contained in the standard file. As explained further below, more
comments can be readily added by the user to document specific parameter choices used in the run.
These comments remain in the file, and are reported to the CALPUFF list file when CALPUFF is
executed from the command line. Note, however, that the GUI always writes the standard comments to
CALPUFF.INP, and ignores any additional text. Furthermore, the control file is always updated by the
GUI, even if the GUI is only used to run CALPUFF without altering the technical content of the control
file. Thus, the user must save the control file to another filename prior to using the GUI if non-standard
comments are to be saved. This feature of the GUI can be used to create a new copy of the standard
control file by merely saving a “new file” to disk, so a fresh version of the control file is always available.
The control file is organized into 18 major Input Groups and a variable number of subgroups within
several of the major Input Groups. The first three lines of the input file consist of a run title. As shown in
Table 9-1, the major Input Groups are defined along functional lines (e.g., technical options, output
options, subgrid scale, complex terrain inputs, etc.). Each subgroup contains a set of data such as source
variables, subgrid scale hill descriptions, or discrete receptor information. The number of subgroups
varies with the number of sources, hills, etc., in the model run.
A sample control file is shown in Table 9-2. The control file is read by a set of Fortran text processing
routines contained within CALPUFF which allow the user considerable flexibility in designing and
customizing the input file. An unlimited amount of optional descriptive text can be inserted within the
control file to make it self-documenting. For example, the definition, allowed values, units, and default
value of each input variable can be included within the control file.
9-2