Model Evaluation and Benchmarking Working Group meeting
On Tuesday April 1st OzEWEX Working Group 2 held a video meeting to detail progress in model benchmarking related areas.
Attendees: Gab Abramowitz, Andrew Frost, Adam Smith, Rob Pipunic, Albert van Dijk, Neil Viney, Barry Croke, Mohsin Hafeez. Apologies: Rachel Law
Topics discussed included:
- an update on action items from the AWAP/AWRA CABLE meeting held on 20th December 2013
- the potential for CABLE and JULES to operate from a shared repository. This followed a visit to Australia from Martin Best and Matt Pryor from the UK Met Office. Of particular interest were automated nightly builds from the repository trunk for models and modelling systems that CABLE is coupled to, as well as interest in co-developing an API for the PALS system to enable more seamless science benchmarking for CABLE and JULES users.
- an update on the progress and interim results from the PALS Land sUrface Model Benchmarking Evaluation pRoject (PLUMBER) experiment, including pointers to systematic issues in the prediction of sensible heat flux across participating land surface models.
- the possibility of incorporating the FACE-MIP experiments outlined in De Kauwe et al (2013) and Zaehle et al (2014) into PALS. While these are primarily carbon cycle experiments they explicitly discuss and evaluate water use efficiency implications for increasing CO2 concentrations.
- OzFlux data availability. Differences between the gap filling approaches in the official OzFlux “standard” stream and the Monash-led “research” stream, availability status, and the upcoming Berkeley Fluxnet release were discussed.
- an update to the land surface ALMA netcdf standard. This activity is coordinated through the GEWEX GLASS panel and aims to develop a new standard based on ALMA that is CF-netcdf compliant and includes a considerable expansion to hydrological and ecological variables. Ultimately could be hosted on PALS, but a development page may be hosted on the OzEWEX site before the release of the new version of PALS.
- a PALS development update, detailing: progress on the transition to PALS’ ‘experiments’ structure; hosting at NCI; use cases for the operation of the new version.
- a PALS funding update, including potential for an ARC linkage proposal, and possible direct investment.
Action items included investigating increased Bureau of Meteorology – Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science cooperation in PALS development and a more detailed post regarding the ALMA netcdf update on the OzEWEX website.
