39. FLASH IDL Routines (fidlr3.0)

fidlr3.0 is a set of routines to read and plot data files produced by FLASH. The routines are written in the graphical display language IDL (Interactive Data Language) and require the IDL program from Research Systems Inc. (http://www.rsi.com). These routines include programs which can be run from the IDL command line to read 1D, 2D, or 3D FLASH datasets, interactively analyze datasets, and interpolate them onto uniform grids.

However, some of these routines are not described in this release of the documentation because they have not been thoroughly tested with FLASH4. A graphical user interface (GUI) to these routines (xflash3) is provided, which enables users to read FLASH AMR datasets and make plots of the data. Both plotfiles and checkpoint files, which differ only in the number and numerical precision of the variables stored, are supported.

fidlr3.0 supports Cartesian, cylindrical, polar and spherical geometries. The proper geometry should be detected by xflash3 using the geometry attribute in the file header. System requirements for running fidlr3.0 are: IDL version 5.6 and above, and the HDF5 library. The routines also have limited support for data files written with netCDF, although this output format has not been thoroughly tested. The routines are intended to be backwards-compatible with FLASH2, although again extensive testing has not been performed.