Previously, Temporal processed a single continuous time period during each execution of the program producing one output file. Typically, only representative Monday, weekday, Saturday and Sunday, plus any holidays are processed for a single month. This type of processing can require complex scripting and Temporal would need to be run several times.

SMOKE now provides the capability for optionally setting non-sequential date processing during a single execution of Temporal using a new input file PROCDATES to indicate a list of dates which Temporal should process. The format for PROCDATES is described in Section 6.3.4, “PROCDATES: Procdates date list”. The format allows for blank lines, comment lines (any lines that start with a pound sign, and trailing comments (any characters after an exclamation point).

G_TSTEP will be used to set the time step for all time periods. The output data for each time period will be written to an endividual file.

An example of PROCDATES file is shown below. In this case, we are processing the first day of each month in 2005. Twelve output files will be produced. Each file will contain 25 time steps.

Temporal procduces two output files [A|M|P]TMP and [A|M|P]TSUP. Since Temporal will need to dynamically create names for the output files, we will use two new environment variables [A|M|P]TMPNAME and [A|M|P]TSUPNAME to set the directory and file prefix used to name the output files. The files will be named using the starting date of each time period. For example, if ATMPNAME is set to /data/ntmp.nctox., (note the period at the end of the file string) the ATMP file for a given time period will be put in the STATIC directory and named "ntmp.nctox.<start date>.ncf".