- The COSIMA recipes are not ready to be ported. There’s heaps of intake conversion/bug fixing to do. And even if they reach the stage they can be ported, they are quite organic in the sense that bugs and fixes are found constantly, as well as new recipes coming up, etc. How would the porting work? Everytime there is a change would it be immediately incorporated to the ESMtools, or would the later be lagging behind?
We had a meeting with @CharlesTurner and @marc.white yesterday and discussed a few ongoing challenges. The conversion to intake is mostly complete, but getting the pull requests reviewed has been tougher than expected. The intake conversion itself is largely a technical step — and that part is done for most recipes.
However, during the conversion process, people uncovered bugs or realised that some workflows could be improved. That’s slowed things down significantly, and it’s become harder to distinguish between what’s a technical task and what’s a scientific one. Ideally, the porting process should preserve the original outputs when moving from the COSIMA cookbook to intake.
Another issue we’re facing is the incomplete transition away from hh5. Some recipes are still relying on data located in temporary or legacy folders on hh5, which is far from ideal and adds further friction to the process.
Because of the overlap between conversion and content fixes, it’s been unclear what to prioritise. We’ve made a few pragmatic decisions and have started merging converted recipes, even if some scientific issues are still unresolved. We’re happy to help and make sure the recipes remain functional for both MOM5 and MOM6.
There’s also been some confusion around what it means to bring COSIMA-recipes into ESMValTool. As you know, ESMValTool is primarily aimed at CMIP evaluation. Its strengths lie in semi-standardised outputs, a wide range of observational products, and a powerful pre-processor that streamlines CMIP model evaluation. The broader ESMValTool community — largely from the ESM world — has been calling for more ocean diagnostics, and the plan at ACCESS-NRI is to help fill that gap using the insights from COSIMA-recipes.
We’ve been careful in our work plan to use language that acknowledges the foundational work of the COSIMA community. Our goal isn’t just to port recipes, but to build on that legacy within a more standardised framework. The hope is that this transition leads to more robust and reusable ocean diagnostics.
That said, we’re not yet in a position to directly use raw model outputs (e.g. OM2, OM3) in ESMValTool. We’re actively working on this, but it depends on some upstream progress — particularly around standardising outputs and improving the flexibility of CF/CMOR conversions.