The KPP kinetic preprocessor is a software tool that assists the computer simulation of chemical kinetic systems. The concentrations of a chemical system evolve in time according to the differential law of mass action kinetics. A numerical simulation requires an implementation of the differential laws and a numerical integration in time.

KPP translates a specification of the chemical mechanism into Fortran77, Fortran90, C, or Matlab simulation code that implements the concentration time derivative function, its Jacobian, and it Hessian, together with a suitable numerical integration scheme. Sparsity in Jacobian/Hessian is carefully exploited in order to obtain computational efficiency.

KPP incorporates a library with several widely used atmospheric chemistry mechanisms; the users can add their own chemical mechanisms to the library. KPP also includes a comprehensive suite of stiff numerical integrators. The KPP development environment is designed in a modular fashion and allows for rapid prototyping of new chemical kinetic schemes as well as new numerical integration methods.

KPP is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the General Public Licence as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. KPP is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public Licence for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public Licence along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.