Hello! I’m playing around with using dye tracers in ACCESS-OM3. I’ve created specific masks for my source regions, and I’ve got a working test that injects the dye at the surface in these masked regions from a specific restart file and then evolves through time. However, I’m struggling to figure out how to get the dye to inject continuously. My masks are not rectangular regions, but the regional_dyes MOM6 tracer package I’m using seems to require rectangular source regions for continuous injection. Does anyone have any insights?
A follow up on this if anyone needs for future reference - I managed to get things working by using USE_FILE_DYES in MOM_input instead of USE_REGIONAL_DYES.
A current problem I have is that USE_FILE_DYES injects the tracer in a continuous additive way (aka. instead of fixing the surface dye concentration at 1, it adds 1 at the surface every call, so the surface dye gets gradually more and more concentrated). I am not sure if clamping the concentration at the surface is possible with USE_FILE_DYES or not
Hi @KZCurtin. Apologies for the silence.
You’re possibly already aware but @angus-g has a PR to MOM6 to make it possible to clamp the concentration with USE_FILE_DYES. We’ll get that merged soon and into ACCESS-OM3 ASAP.
Yes, thank you both so much for the help with this!
@angus-g’s PR has been merged. It may be a little while before we do another ACCESS-OM3 release, so I’ve created a “prerelease” that you can use in the meantime. You can use this by making the following changes to your config.yaml:
...
#Model software version
modules:
use:
- /g/data/vk83/modules
+ - /g/data/vk83/prerelease/modules
load:
- - access-om3/2026.05.002
+ - access-om3/pr257-1
- model-tools/mppnccombine-fast/2025.07.000
...
manifest:
reproduce:
- exe: True
+ exe: False
...
Add the following to your MOM_input to prevent the accumulation of tracers with USE_FILE_DYES:
FILE_DYE_TRACERS_ACCUMULATE = False