Monthly ESMValTool meeting October

[bouweandela]

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

Friday, October 15 at 14:00 CEST (13:00 BST).

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 September meeting can be found here: #2254

[bouweandela]

A first discussion item could be topics for the upcoming workshop planned for November (#2311)

[bouweandela]

Also have a look at the upcoming testing strategy meeting (#2259) if you're interested

[bouweandela]

I would also like to ask people's opinion on our Wikis #2330

[bouweandela]

Personal updates

• @alistairsellar Is looking into whether or not we should have a contributor license agreement
• @rswamina Update from user engagement team: proposed meeting at workshop (ESMValTool workshop Nov 2021 #2311) and will be working on updating the tutorial in the coming months
• @zklaus Working on release, fixing problems on conda-forge, update from ESGF developments in IS-ENES3: new web interface and stac search client, a meeting on provenance took place to see if we can make climate4impact, METACLIP, and ESMValTool provenance more interoperable. Started up H2020 ESM2025 project in which work will be done to improve climate models, in particular the nitrogen cycle, methane cycle and also some ESMValTool development: site level diagnostics. Proposes to organize cross-project open tutorial together with Jeanette Besembinder from KNMI and @ESMValGroup/userengagementteam. @rswamina Says regular tutorials might need funding. @zklaus Suggests about 1 to 3 times a year.
• @bettina-gier Giving lectures on ESMValTool together with @schlunma
• @remi-kazeroni Please fill the doodle for the workshop in ESMValTool workshop Nov 2021 #2311, doodle will be closed on Wednesday October 20th. New version of Synda will be released soon. Reviewed pull requests, tested cmorizer and download pull request Streamline observations download #1657 🥳 Plan to include in v2.5.
• @valeriupredoi Working on IS-ENES3 D9.3 deliverable report, reviewed pull requests Add an option to download missing data from ESGF ESMValCore#1217, helping release manager @zklaus with v2.4 release, maintenance
• @katjaweigel Working on flato regional plots in Splitting of flato13ipcc.yml into separate recipes and adding recipes for regional Figures #2156, but encountered some problems with runtime/memory use. This may be a useful feature to know about for resuming runs: Add support for re-using preprocessor output from previous runs ESMValCore#1321.
• @sloosvel Improved handling of ancillary variables in preprocessor Handle fx variables in extract_levels and some time operations ESMValCore#1269, working on replacing start_year and end_year in recipe with timerange in Allow to load all files, first X years or last X years in an experiment ESMValCore#1133
• @jvegasbsc Wrapping up open pull requests, cmorizer Streamline observations download #1657 and monitoring recipe Recipe to plot generic output from the preprocessor #2184

[bouweandela]

Discussion on the v2.4 release

• ESMValCore v2.4 release delayed by 1 week, will be a release candidate this time and a final release at the same time as the ESMValTool
• Closed 46 issues in the milestone, only 2 issues remaining. Preference to do developments earlier in release cycle
• ESMValCore release candidate will be made available on conda-forge with dev label
• A pull request will be made to update the tool so it uses the new ESMValCore, once that is merged we will run all recipes with the cylc suite and ask for reviews.
• @remi-kazeroni Asked about streamlining the installation with mamba. @valeriupredoi has been working on this in added notes on use of mamba in the installation documentation chapter #2236 and replace use of conda with mamba for conda_install test on Circle CI #2237 and @zklaus is working on this in Fix installation instructions for Julia #2335. NCL dependencies on conda-forge have been updated by @zklaus.
• @rswamina Asked about updating the tutorial: it would be best to do this after the ESMValTool installation documentation has been updated. The new automatic download feature (use esmvaltool run --offline=False recipe_name.yml to run the recipe and automatically download missing data from ESGF) should also be useful for the tutorial.
• @alistairsellar Asked if there are any responsibilities attached to contributing a recipe (e.g. future maintenance). @bouweandela Thinks that institutes that sign the consortium agreement should be held responsible for maintaining the recipes that they have contributed in the past. It will be difficult to ask individual contributors for such a commitment. Discussion to be continued at the workshop ESMValTool workshop Nov 2021 #2311.
• We discussed the plan for testing recipes for the upcoming release. We expect the recipe maintainers to look into issues if they are not easy to solve technically.

[bouweandela]

@zklaus Asked for comments on #2280

[bouweandela]

@zklaus Asked to have a look at the milestone and suggest highlights for the v2.4 ESMValCore release ESMValGroup/ESMValCore#1342

[bouweandela]

Note that the monthly meetings will be announced in the Community repository from now on. This repository generates fewer notifications, so should be easier to subscribe to.