@lawless –
A few things…
- MCIP does not need any spinup time. Not sure where that came from. You may want some science processes in the meteorological model to spin up, such as clouds need a few hours and some land-surface interactions (if they are “cold started”) could require several days to a few weeks. These are a function of the meteorology and not of MCIP itself.
- @mmallard is correct the MCIP is not set up to handle WRF restart files (“wrfrst”). You must use the WRF history/output files (“wrfout”).
- As @mmallard mentioned, MCIP does not care how many output time steps are in any given file. They can certainly vary. MCIP only wants you to list them in order in the script in the “InMetFiles” variable that is used to build the namelist. MCIP will search that list for the time it wants, and it will create an error condition if it cannot find the next time to process (based on INTVL, in minutes).
- Finally, one of the nuances of using WRF data is that the precipitation is partitioned into buckets of convective and non-convective liquid-equivalent precipitation that continue to accumulate from the initialization of the WRF simulation. CMAQ requires a total over its “time step” (nominally one hour, but technically that should be flexible). We use WRF data for CMAQ at some point after the model is initialized (to allow key fields like PBL height and clouds to be non-zero). Consequently, we need to provide the WRF output data that covers one CMAQ time step (typically one hour, which seems to be what you used here) prior to the start of the data that you want MCIP to process so that the precipitation increment can be calculated by subtracting off the previous accumulated total.
**The answer to your question is in #4.
–Tanya