Minutes of the code management group meeting 15/5/2012

Location: Cambridge

Present (for all or part of the meeting): Nick Savage (Met Office), Mohit Dalvi (Met Office), Colin Johnson (Met Office), Luke Abraham (Cambridge University), Alex Archibald (Cambridge University), Graham Mann (Leeds University)

Code management. The code management guidelines were discussed. The following amendments to the guidelines were agreed.
1. The purpose section should be amended to make it friendlier and more focussed on UKCA as a community model implying common working practices. Following the guidelines is required for code to be lodged in the main UKCA code base. All developers are encouraged to follow this advice.
2. It was agreed that the previous of jobs was a responsibility of the whole CMG and not just the Met Office.
3. There was a long discussion about what we mean by "standard jobs" and it became clear that NS and the NCAS scientists were using the term to mean something different! Two type of jobs are really needed and we have to help provide these. First of all well validated, supported, scientific configurations which can be used as 'control' models to test new science. These will be called Supported science configurations. Secondly, jobs used to test the impact of changes being made. These jobs would typically be run for very short integrations to demonstrate that the change has not altered configurations it should not be changing (i.e. if you turn this new change off are the results identical to a job without the branch). These may include some jobs with UKCA off and will be called Standard testing jobs. They are also the basis for any automated testing through the UTF. The details of the jobs to be provided was discussed further later in the meeting.
4. Tickets. It was decided to attempt to have the ticketing system for UKCA changes on the Collaboration Wiki not on PUMA.
NS to make requested modifications and publish the new guidelines

To be proposed at next UKCA exec meeting that a living science plan is needed including input from management on future plans
code ownership.
1. Formal code owner at Met Office. It was agreed to propose to the next UKCA executive meeting that Nick Savage takes over formal responsibility as code owner. He is already representing UKCA at UM Project Board Meetings.
2. Subsection experts - names and responsibilities. As the code owner cannot be an expert in every part of the code, it was agreed that we would nominate experts for each subsection of the code. These people would act as first points of contact for people considering modifying the code and the code owner will check if they are happy with the code as part of the lodging process. Note that those names below in italics were not at the meeting and so are currently only suggested as subsection experts, pending discussion. There will be an expert for each of the chemistry schemes.
  - MODE - Graham Mann
  - Core code (ukca_chemistry_ctl , ukca_d1_defs etc) - Colin Johnson
  - RADAER and greenhouse gas data flow to radiation code - Nicolas Bellouin
  - Wet deposition - Zak Kipling
  - Dry deposition - Gerd Folberth
  - Lower BC and emissions - Mohit Dalvi
  - Photolysis - Paul Telford
  - ASAD - Luke Abraham
  - RAQ chemistry - Nick Savage
  - ExtTC - Gerd Folberth
  - Top boundary conditions - Alex Archibald
  - TropIsop (aka CHET) - Alex Archibald
  - Standard tropospheric chemistry (includes transform_halogen) - Alex Archibald
  - Stratospheric chemistry - Luke Abraham
  - Heterogeneous chemistry - Colin Johnson
  - Aerosol chemistry - Colin Johnson
NS to check that all people above are willing to be subsection experts and then publish a list so users know who to contact
Plans for the next year
1. vn8.3 - minor technical changes only. It has been agreed by the UM project board that this should be a closed release. No science changes will be allowed. At the moment 4 UKCA tickets are open: putting the namelist for UKCA into its own module; making UKCA ENDGAME compatible; splitting up the stratospheric photolysis routines into separate files and removing the final UKCA specific include files (replacing them with modules). Code review submission closing date 14/09/12.
2. Met Office science changes. The two main Met Office priorities for next year are HadGEM3-ES and moving AQUM to using GLOMAP-MODE aerosols. Ticket supporting HadGEM3-ES include: update to lightning emissions, RADAER part 2, nitrate aerosols for MODE, Modal dust. More minor changes which did not make 8.2 but are needed include: the fix to transform halogen, improving the process split for emissions of aerosols, plumbing the ACTIVATE results into the cloud schemes and any changes which come from the work Colin and Graham are doing on aerosol wet deposition. Clearly the addition of the two extra aerosol types will be very challenging. For making AQUM work with MODE the two main task is adding sulphur chemistry to RAQ. There is also a ticket open to add interactive biogenic emissions and to add the ExtTC chemsitry scheme. Finally a planned rewrite of the emissions code is underway, which will make the code more flexible and also use NetCDF files for input.
3. NCAS science changes. Although many of the above changes came from NCAS initially, as they have already been adopted by the Met Office, no external review prior to adoption will be needed. The code will still have to be reviewed by the usual Met Office code reviews. Code which we will first review are described in this section. One of the first pieces of code which will be reviewed is likely to be the wet deposition updates by Zak Kipling.
Setting up new UKCA wiki
1. templates for code review and ticket summary
2. tickets
Configuration management
Code testing external to Met Office
1. configurations to undergo routine testing
2. UTF on postproc and alternatives
3. External reviewers for NCAS changes
Location for minutes of these meetings and access policy
date/time of next meeting

Also discussed more informally were:

Optimisation
Validation suite
IRIS