Hi Chris et al.,

     indeed it seems like some clarification is necessary about the use of 
different calendars in modelling. Your suggestion to "map" the 360 day calendar 
onto the Gregorian calendar in output files won't work: there would be no need 
for a 360 day calendar if it would. The idea behind fixed-length-year calendars 
is precisely the opposite: preserve seasonality without having to deal with 
leap years etc. Of course you need to adjust the solar cycle accordingly, that 
means your model will have a solar year that is precisely 360 days long (and 
not 365.25 as in reality). If you were to map these dates onto the gregorian 
calendar, you would have to interpolate the time axis so that days 1 to 360 fit 
into the range 1 to 365 or 366, respectively. Yes - a converter 360-days (or 
365-days) to gregorian (and reverse) could be written, but you would redce the 
number of your friends if you insist that this is the only valid way to 
represent time of the model output ;-)

    You are right that a date such as 1960-01-31 is invalid in a 360-day 
calendar, and indeed a smart tool should flag this as an error.

Hope this helps,

Martin



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