Monthly ESMValTool meeting September

[bouweandela]

The next monthly ESMValTool meeting will be in September. The result of the poll is that it will be on

Thursday, September 2 at 16:00 CEST (15:00 BST).

If none of the proposed times work for you, please let us know by commenting below.

The duration will be one hour. Join the zoom meeting.

Calendar invitations to the meeting are sent to the mailing list, join it here.

@ESMValGroup/esmvaltool-developmentteam

Format and agenda

• Anyone with an interest in ESMValTool is welcome to join and ask questions
• We start the meeting by doing a round where everyone gets one minute to introduce themselves and tell what they will be working on in the next month or what they would like help with.
• Using the input from the introduction round, we can decide to talk about specific topics with the entire group or make smaller breakout groups to continue the discussion there.
• If you already know that you would like to bring up a particular topic in the meeting, you can mention the GitHub issue on the topic in a comment below. That will make it easy to find for other people in the meeting and we can already start discussing there before the meeting. Just create a new GitHub issue about your topic if there is no open issue yet.
• GitHub issues are our preferred way to communicate outside the meeting and keep track of work, so any feature requests/action items/etc discussed in the meeting should ideally result in a GitHub issue.

Notes from the August meeting can be found here: #2240 (comment)

[bouweandela]

I would like to discuss ESMValGroup/ESMValCore#1287 at the monthly meeting.

[bouweandela]

Thanks for joining everyone! Here is a summary with personal updates:

• Findlay Smith - Met Office - Working on multi model comparisons of SO2 and SO4
• @valeriupredoi - Back from holiday and worked on maintenance of infrastructure
• @remi-kazeroni - Will work on observations download review together with @jvegasbsc
• @zklaus - Worked on release of v2.3, now available on conda-forge 🥳
• @Emmadd - KNMI - Working with and improving KCS recipe
• @bsolino - Plans to work on supporting the ICON model
• @schlunma - Created ozone diagnostics and will also work on ICON Cmorizer
• @ehogan - Senior scientific software engineer at Met Office - Working moving Autoassess diagnostics to on ESMvalTool together with @Jon-Lillis
• @hb326 Ozone diagnostics together with @schlunma paper for ozone assessment and related CMORizers, will submit paper with @axel-lauer and work on MBQB and SBQB will be made public
• @Jon-Lillis Software engineer at Met Office, working together with @ehogan on moving Autoassess diagnostics to ESMValTool
• Tammy - Met Office - Climate change department diagnostics into ESMValtool

The topics that were discussed at the meeting are mentioned in other comments in this discussion. If you have something to say, you're welcome to scroll to your topic and continue the discussion there. If you feel a particular topic is important, you can click the up arrow to move it up on this page.

[bouweandela]

Grids

@zklaus Is working with the iris team at the Met Office on regridding for projections and non-regular grids. iris-esmf-regrid is progressing well and @zklaus plans to to make this available in the next ESMValCore release. ICON grid can be read and works with unstructured_nearest, but region selection, area statistics are not yet possible before regrid, as are iris aggregation, collapse, intersection. @zklaus will ask @bjlittle about planned work on this topic in an issue or discussion in the iris repository and @schlunma can provide example files from the ICON model. Meshes not in 3.1, maybe in 3.2 planned for winter, ongoing work here.

[bouweandela]

Next release in October

Next release will be in October, see the schedule here:

2021-10-04	ESMValCore feature freeze
2021-10-11	ESMValCore release
2021-10-18	ESMValTool feature freeze
2021-10-25	ESMValTool release

@ESMValGroup/esmvaltool-developmentteam Please assign the issues/pull request you plan to finish for the next release to the v2.4 milestone so the release manager (@zklaus) is aware of them and can help you get them solved/merged in time.
If you have deliverables for IS-ENES3, this is the last release before the end of the year so preferably any deliverables for this reporting period should be in. IPCC features and diagnostics: not much news, probably everyone is taking a nice long holiday.

[bouweandela]

Printing input/output files on the screen

Related issue: ESMValGroup/ESMValCore#1287

• @schlunma Suggested only printing out if there are just a few datasets, just a few files
• @bouweandela Could be useful for new users to understand the tool -> but the new users in the meeting indicated that this is not the case.
• New users agree that a summary would be useful
• Progress message would be appreciated
• @zklaus Suggests printing a message that the list of input and output files can be found in the debug log

[bouweandela]

Installation is difficult

• @hb326 Was having problems installing ESMValTool from source - good experience with using mamba
• @zklaus has been working on the installation, installation of the esmvaltool package should have improved with the move to conda-forge
• @zklaus Set channel priority to strict when using conda-forge
• @valeriupredoi and @zklaus will work on updating the installation documentation so it mentions mamba
• Documentation contributions from anyone with recent installation experience are very welcome!

[ehogan]

Please see #2175 for my experience in installing ESMValTool :)

[bouweandela]

Testing meeting

@hb326 Testing meeting between workshops to discuss recipe testing strategy. Anyone with an interest is very welcome to join, the meeting will last 2 to 3 hours. See #2259 for a poll and further information.

[bouweandela]

Experimental API

@Emmadd Asked how stable the experimental API is. @bouweandela replied that at the moment it is fairly stable, because we have no funding available to develop it further. Hopefully, this will change in the future and we will be able to extend it further. Preprocessor functions are available in the stable esmvalcore.preprocessor module.

[Peter9192]

If you have any feedback that could inform future development, that is of course very welcome!