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During our discussion at the VRVS meeting, it quickly became clear that we can't just have an additional XML tag that specifies a reference time for an entire simulation because complicated simulations can be constructed as the concatenations of several XML files. A less-appealing alternative is to have the reference MET specifiable as an optional parameter for any source that requires a time specification.
The question also came up whether there should be one true
Toby mentioned during the meeting that for running Gleam he has implemented a reference time like this, something like the launch date of GLAST. It isn't clear to me that we want to have just one reference time, because a few years into the mission we'd be back to dealing with time offsets in the 100,000,000+ range, but I've asked Toby to describe how his implementation works, and I (or he) will post them here.
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