Helen Macdonald: A Coastal Commons: Shared Infrastructure for Cross-Model Ocean Science in Australia
Regional ocean models must capture a complex range of coastal processes across a wide range of scales to be effective tools for understanding Australian coastlines. No single model code spans all these scales and processes, so researchers select the model best suited to their science question. But modern science challenges increasingly require cross-scale and cross-process collaboration, which is difficult to achieve across separate models.
To address this, we are developing infrastructure and models that focus on points of commonality and bridging gaps between different models. In this presentation we will show:
- Workflows to develop and share model configurations across codebases using payu, GitHub, and Spack
- Shared notebooks for post-processing model output, including a model-agnostic strategy
- A shared, super-regional Australian model, with output shared for analysis and configuration files shared for experimentation and collaborative development
- A system for automated forecasting and hindcasting for use in a research setting.
Together, these initiatives form a “coastal commons,” currently supporting regional MOM6 (ACCESS-rOM3) and ROMS configurations, with the capability to incorporate further model codes.
We demonstrate the coastal commons through the sharing and assessment of a super-regional Australian MOM6 configuration, at 4 km resolution with biogeochemistry (WOMBAT), covering the Australian region and available for community use. This presentation will interest researchers and software engineers working with high-resolution models, regional and coastal models, or in the oceans around Australia.