[Mesa-users] Adding and swapping atmosphere tables

[Francis Timmes]

hi giovanni,

i admire the your determination to get the mist atm tables operational! 

you are right that supporting user supplied atm tables could be improved. one path forward on the development side might be to add an option to atm_table = "X"  where X is the filename of a user supplied table (https://docs.mesastar.org/en/release-r24.03.1/atm/table.html). another path might be to resurrect the other_atm module from before the ~2019 atm overhaul and put it in modern form. or both.

fxt




> On Jul 5, 2024, at 2:53 AM, Giovanni Mirouh via Mesa-users <mesa-users at lists.mesastar.org> wrote:
> 
> Dear all,
> I am sorry to insist, but I would really be grateful for any opinion from the community: is there a better way to include new atmosphere tables than making changes to the atmosphere fortran routines?
> My original email is below for more details, I thank you all in advance for any pointers you could give me.
> Best.
> On 22/6/24 17:07, Giovanni Mirouh wrote:
>> Dear MESA community, 
>> 
>> I am interested in swapping atmosphere tables from default MESA to MIST photosphere tables and run comparisons. 
>> 
>> I have looked into the mesa-users archives and found various recommendations. The one that I managed to implement is to replace the tables, the summary file, and the test output in $MESA_DIR/atm/atm_data and $MESA_DIR/atm/test, then reinstall MESA, recompile and run star. However there are a few things I dislike about this approach: first, I don't like swapping files inside the code itself (even if I trust the MIST tables), second I need to swap files and reinstall MESA every time I want to change from default MESA to MIST which is quite long ... 
>> 
>> The other strategy I've read about consists in changing other_atm.f90 but this file is nowhere to be seen, I think it's been scrapped from v.12115. The changelog for that version points to the file http://mesa.sourceforge.net/assets/atm-user-guide.txt that doesn't exist anymore. Finally the current documentation does not mention adding new tables. 
>> Ideally, I would like to add tables and summary files in the $MESA_DIR/atm/atm_data directory and define new keywords for those tables inside MESA, so I can swap them without recompiling using a control (e.g. "atm_table = 'mist_photosphere'", as you would do with the "native" tables). Is this a workable approach? or would that require too many changes in the source code? 
>> 
>> I would be very thankful for any input on the best strategy here. I am not too sure which files to attach here, I use MESA v.23.05.1 with the corresponding SDK on Ubuntu and downloaded the MIST atmosphere tables from Choi Jieun's github repo https://github.com/jieunchoi/MIST_codes/. 
>> 
>> Please let me know if you need more information. 
>> Best. 
>> -- 
>> Giovanni Mirouh.
> -- 
> Giovanni Mirouh.
> _______________________________________________
> mesa-users at lists.mesastar.org
> https://lists.mesastar.org/mailman/listinfo/mesa-users
>