Introduction

CoastalME (Coastal Modelling Environment) simulates the long-term behaviour of a coast. This initial version considers only simple soft cliff cross-shore effects. However, development of CoastalME is ongoing. Watch this space!

CoastalME was devised and constructed by Andres Payo Garcia (British Geological Survey: agarc.nosp@m.ia@b.nosp@m.gs.ac.nosp@m..uk) and David Favis-Mortlock (British Geological Survey: dfm1@.nosp@m.bgs..nosp@m.ac.uk). We are very grateful to the following for support, assistance, and inspiration: Tom Ashby, Manuel Cobos Budia, Wilf Chun, Mark Dickson, Jim W. Hall, Martin D. Hurst, Matthew Ives, Robert J. Nicholls, Ian Townend, and Mike J.A. Walkden.

See https://github.com/coastalme/coastalme for the stable release version, and the unstable development version, of the source code.

From Shingle Street
To Orford Ness
The waves maraud,
The winds oppress,
The earth can’t help
But acquiesce
For this is east
And east means loss,
A lessening shore, receding ground,
Three feet gone last year, four feet this
Where land runs out and nothing’s sound.
Nothing lasts long on Shingle Street.

By Blake Morrison (2018). See https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/419911/shingle-street-by-morrison-blake/9780701188771

Installing CoastalME

Obtaining the source code

CoastalME builds easily using Linux. If you wish to run CoastalME on Windows, then we currently recommend using the Windows Subsystem Linux (WSL) software to do this.

Create a local copy of the github repository, for example by downloading a zipfile, then unpacking it or cloning. We suggest unpacking it to something like "/home/YOUR NAME/Projects/CoastalME/", this is then your CoastalME folder.

  git clone https://github.com/coastalme/coastalme

Building CoastalME

In a terminal window (i.e. at a command-line prompt) move to the CoastalME folder.

Then move to the the src folder

  cd CoastalME/src

and run run_cmake.sh

  ./run_cmake.sh

If you get a "Permission denied" message:

  -bash: ./run_cmake.sh: Permission denied

you will have to grant executable permission using

  chmod a+x run_cmake.sh, chmod a+x cshore/make_cshore.sh and then ./run_cmake.sh

This will build CShore, look for GDAL, and write the CMake files. If you see error messages about missing software (for example, telling you that CMake cannot be found or is too old, or GDAL cannot be found or is too old) then you need to install or update the software that is causing the problem.

Next, run

  make install

This will create an executable file called cme in the CoastalME folder.

Running CoastalME

Specifying the input file

Edit cme.ini to tell CoastalME which input file to read (for example, in/test_suite/minimal_wave_angle_230/minimal.dat).

Running CoastalME

Leave the src folder, and run cme

  cd ..
  ./cme

Output will appear in the "Path for output" folder.

Running CoastalME's test suite

To check that your installation is running correctly, you can run a suite of pre-defined tests by running the following commands:

  chmod a+x run_test_suite.sh
  ./run_test_suite.sh

The chmod comand ensures that you have permission to execute the run_test_suite.sh file.

Managing CoastalME's output

Once you have CoastalME (CME) up and running, you can reduce the quantity of output (it can be overwhelming!) in several ways.

Change "Content of log file" in the CME input file for any of the test suite runs (the name of this input file is listed in cme.ini, both are simple text files). If you set "Content of log file" to zero, then CME won't output a log file; setting it to 4 (all output) is really only useful to developers.

Change "GIS vector files to output" and "GIS vector files to output" in the CME input file. These are both set to "all" in the test suite files on GitHub. Instead of "all" you can list the space-separated codes for only the GIS output that you want to see. A list of CME GIS output codes is in codes.txt.

Enjoy!