Monthly ESMValtool meeting January

[bouweandela]

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

Monday, January 11 at 16:00 CET (15:00 GMT).

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 in this issue. 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 previous meeting can be found here: #1900 (comment)

[bouweandela]

Topic for discussion brought up by @valeriupredoi: abstracts to EGU 2021 are due in 2 days.

I am planning to submit an abstract describing some of the technical improvements we made to the ESMValTool and especially the ESMValCore the past year to the session on Innovative Evaluation Frameworks and Platforms for Weather and Climate Research. Let me know if you would like to be a co-author! I'll add some people who I know did a lot as co-authors, but since there is a limit to the amount of time I plan to spend typing the names of co-authors and a huge number of people contributed to the tool over the past year, be sure to let me know if you care about being listed.

[bouweandela]

Thanks for attending @ESMValGroup/esmvaltool-developmentteam!

Here is a summary with some news:

• @jvegasbsc Reminded us that the deadline for submitting new features to the ESMValCore for the upcoming 2.2 release is February 1 (see the release schedule). We will try to include support for iris 3 in this release (already tested with the release candidate in Switch to Iris 3 ESMValCore#819), provided it is released this week.
• @remi-kazeroni Promised to have a look at Streamline observations download #1657 so it can be included in the next release of ESMValTool
• @sloosvel Asked about support for pre-processing ancillary variables and may have time to work on the topic (see also Preprocessor chain is not being applied to cell measures ESMValCore#436 and Generalize preprocessing on fx variables used for preprocessor masks ESMValCore#449).
• @schlunma Is working on including the work from more of his papers into ESMValTool and asked @hb326 for a scientific review of Added changes in shared functions necessary for schlund20esd #1967
• @nielsdrost Asked if anyone has tried the esmvalbot yet. So far not many people used it, so maybe some more documentation on how to use it might be a good idea. Most people in the meeting seemed to doubt whether it would be able to run their recipes because the bot has only 16 GB of memory available. See here for examples of how to use the bot to test a recipe in your pull request with the bot: Add documentation on ESMValBot #1882
• @katjaweigel Will look into submitting something about one of her papers to EGU 21 if she can find the time. She also reported that some of the flags that can be provided to the esmvaltool run command result in unexpected behaviour of the tool. @bouweandela mentioned that these flags were implemented for quick debugging and should not be used for creating figures in publications and created issue Add warning about usability of run command line flags ESMValCore#936.
• @hb326 Presented ESMValTool at AGU 2020! And is also working on making some of the work that was done in C3S 511 available in XCH4 ESA CMUG diagnostics (subset of the MPQB diagnostics) #1960 by re-using it for the XCH4 ESA CMUG deliverable
• @bettina-gier Asked about deriving variables from other variables that are not on the same grid. Currently the only way to do this would probably be to call the regrid function from the derive function. She also mentioned that certain CMIP6 data seems to have disappeared from Mistral at DKRZ without notice, similar to this issue reported by @rswamina here CMIP6 Data missing or withdrawn #1835
• @rswamina Was unable to attend but shared the following update by email: "The only update I wanted to share was that the User Engagement group is planning to hold another ESMValTool Tutorial Marathon in February. This is to add material for more advances use of the tool (writing own diagnostics, Github installation etc.) . We will be posting our updates and announcements on the Github page for everyone to see and participate."
• @valeriupredoi Has been working on fixing the unit tests that broke over Christmas, much appreciated!
• @bsolino Is still working on building support for EMAC data into the ESMValCore. @schlunma will be helping out and @jvegasbsc also offered help. @zklaus plans to implement something similar for the EC-EARTH. The idea would be to follow the example for reading ERA5 data in its native format, and in the case of EMAC, automatically add some extra facets from a yaml file while parsing the recipe, to facilitate data finding without specifying everything in the recipe, similar to how the institute is added automatically for CMIP5 and CMIP6 data. There is some documentation available about implementing fixes here and @bsolino offered to extend that as he learns more.
• @bouweandela Has been working on improving the documentation and getting the technical review team up to speed
• @sloosvel and @jvegasbsc have been working on adding support for seasonal forecast data, see Allow data with extra dimension to pass the CMOR checks ESMValCore#871. @jvegasbsc proposed to have a meeting to make a plan for relaxing certain CMOR checks (if needed) and what else is needed to support this data.

The list of updates above has been compiled from memory, so please forgive me if I forgot anything and feel free to add it yourself.

EGU 2021

We talked about the upcoming EGU and concluded that it would be nice to submit as many abstracts as possible to share the awesome things that were achieved using the ESMValTool in the past year + the coming months leading up to EGU 21. There is a generic model evaluation session here that we will submit several overview abstracts to, but submitting abstracts to science focussed sessions is much appreciated, as this really shows that the tool can be used to do awesome science with to the scientific community.

• @LisaBock @hb326 @axel-lauer Plan to submit an overview of new recipes and diagnostics that were added over the past year
• @katjaweigel Might submit an abstract about one of the papers she is currently working on if she can find the time. Note that the deadline is usually extended by 1 or 2 days because of technical issues arising on the day of the deadline
• @bouweandela Plans to submit an overview of technical improvements over the past year
• @schlunma Will present his PhD work in a scientific session and mention that he used to tool for this
• @Peter9192 Submitted an abstract presenting the use of the tool from a Jupyter Lab/Notebook, which he has been working on together with @stefsmeets
• @SarahAlidoost Plans to submit an abstract to an hydrology session about the use of ESMValTool for hydrology in the eWaterCycle project

@nielsdrost came up with the idea of creating and sharing a single slide introducing the ESMValTool that could be used to present the tool in scientific presentations, this might be interesting for the @ESMValGroup/userengagementteam

[valeriupredoi]

likewise, much appreciated, @bouweandela for holding these meetings and taking notes too 🍺 🍺

For EGU - I volunteer as backup speaker for anyone that may be unable to give their talk, for some reason - I am not submitting an abstract myself so I am free to float around 🚢

[ruthlorenz]

Sorry for missing the meeting....
We will submit an abstract about the ClimWIP implementation into ESMValTool.