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19/9/20026
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Participants: 6, note @clairecarouge, @lachlanswhyborn (at minimum) were attending the LSMS-II event in Italy.
General discussion around 3 topics:
- feedback (WG to NRI) on land and coupled modelling workshop
- initial feedback from @alexnorton to WG regarding ACCESS-NRI Science Advisory Committee meeting and progress towards 10-year roadmap
- deprecating (or not) the simpler carbon cycle model in cable (cable_carbon)
land and couple modelling workshop
Community feedback on the event was generally positive. Participants did value to opportunity to connect with the coupled/Earth system modelling communities (especially given that many of us span the two), however some expressed regret to not have opportunity to connect more deeply with the other WGs (ML, atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere).
There is a lesson for the land-WG to be more proactive during the scoping of these events to ensure that a timeslot is maintained for the WG to review/renew its 12 month work plan.
ACCESS-NRI SAC
The ACCESS-NRI Scientific Advisory Committee is tasked with providing scientific input on community research needs to the ACCESS-NRI board - @alexnorton is land WG representative. One task assigned to the SAC is the development of a 10-yer roadmap for the ACCESS-NRI - with some expectation that this will be useful more broadly when setting the research agenda for the NRI partners and climate research community more broadly. The SAC met on 10/9/2026 with a welcome to new members and an outline from each of the WGs around community nominated infrastructure needs (covering model development cycle and coordination, model release, data and resource management, communications, and training and other activitities).
@alexnorton will be reaching out to community members to assist with task of refining/prioritising the land-WG nominated activities onto 2-, 5- and 10-year time horizons.
@tha051 noted that since 21st century weather has nominated climate projections as an activity of interest then the requirements/experiment design and associated infrastructure needs of CORDEX (as well as CMIP) should be within scope of the roadmap. This may colour science development needs of the land WG.
Deprecating cable_carbon
Recent investigations with ACCESS-CM3 has highlighted a technical aspect of the cable_carbon reduced complexity carbon cycle module that manifests as failures of reproducibility. As cable_carbon is old, and superseded scientifically by CASA, this raises the question as to whether we should opt to deprecate/remove the code from CABLE.
Amongst the attendees no-one was using cable_carbon or was not aware that they were using it - but note the limited number of attendees.
@tha051, while generally supportive of removing redundant code, did ask whether there was a formal process regarding deprecating code, i.e. stated steps with a timeline to alert the community ahead of removal.
There are then three areas to follow up: 1) to undertake a more extensive community engagement around usage of cable_carbon, 2) check which applications of CABLE may use this capability “inadvertently”, and 3) determine/document a more general process around deprecating code and CABLE branches. Full deprecation of the cable_carbon module is a non-trivial exercise as there intersections with the i/o code for ACCESS-ESM1.6, ACCESS3 and for the offline model.
AOB
The WG-chairs (@clairecarouge, @inh599, @mlipson) need to confirm with potential presenters who will be giving science presentations (for 1st Tuesday each month) - certainly for the next 3 months.
next meeting: 6/10/2026