The influence of dynamic topography, climate, and tectonics on the Nile River source-to-sink system – Badlands model scripts and inputs

This repository contains Badlands .xml config files for three of the models from Christopher Alfonso's 2020 Honours thesis, as well as Python scripts to run the models. Model input data can be downloaded from Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/record/4321853/files/data-bundle.zip) and placed in the appropriate directory (inputs/{model_name}/data). Preferably, however, running either the Python script setup.py or the shell script setup.sh will download all input data and place it into the appropriate directories.

In order to run the models, cd into the appropriate subdirectory within the scripts directory (i.e. scripts/{model_name}), then run python run_models.py. Model outputs will be placed in the results/{model_name} directory. Running the models requires an installation of Badlands (https://github.com/badlands-model/badlands) in your Python environment.

Alternatively, the scripts can be run in a Docker environment. To do this, make sure your working directory is set to the root directory of this repository (where Dockerfile is located), then run the command docker build -t nile-honours .. After this is complete, run the command docker run -itv "${PWD}":/home --name nile-honours nile-honours. This will create a Docker container including all of the Python packages required to run the models.

To create visual snapshots of the model results, run the visualise_results.py Python script for a given model (i.e. python scripts/{model_name}/visualise_results.py). These snapshots can then be used to create an animation of the model evolution through time using the create_animations.sh script (requires FFmpeg: ffmpeg.org; FFmpeg is also included in the Docker container).