Dates and Clocks

Because ecFlow was designed with ECMWF suites in mind, the date is a very important notion. ecFlow defines the time using clocks. A clock is an attribute of a suite. Different suites can have different clocks. There are two kinds of clocks:

• real clock

• hybrid clock

A suite clock can be modified by a gain. This is useful for suites running on older data (e.g. cleaning up old data).

The value of the date is in the generated variable ECF_DATE, and the value of the time is in ECF_TIME. ECF_CLOCK contains other information such as the day of week.

It is safer for a job to always use the suite generated time and date variables, and not access directly the system date to prevent confusion.

What to do:

1. Try to modify the suite to run with a clock date from the previous week use the ecflow_client

   ecflow_client --alter change clock_date <day>.<month>.<year>  /test
   

   E.g.:

   ecflow_client --alter change clock_date 1.4.2020   /test
   

2. Check the values of the ecFlow variables

3. Set the suite clock to sync with the computer:

   ecflow_client --alter change clock_sync   /test
   

   Check with:

   client --get /test | grep clock
   

Note

• Be aware that cron with a single time dependency will automatically resubmit indefinitely

• Altering the clock, requires that the suite is re-queued