Romain Beucher: Toward rapid, community evaluation of ACCESS ocean and sea-ice model outputs with ESMValTool
Robust and repeatable evaluation workflows are increasingly important as ACCESS modelling moves toward CMIP7, higher-throughput model development, and more open community diagnostics. This presentation describes ongoing work to extend ESMValTool-based evaluation workflows to ACCESS ocean and sea-ice model outputs, with an initial focus on ACCESS-ESM1.6 and the ACCESS-OM family, including ACCESS-OM2 and emerging ACCESS-OM3 configurations.
The work sits within broader ACCESS-NRI efforts around the Rapid Evaluation Framework, which aims to provide scalable, reproducible evaluation of model simulations before publication and during model development. We discuss how ESMValTool can support this goal by connecting standardised diagnostics, provenance tracking, and community-developed recipes with ACCESS model output workflows.
A central challenge is that many evaluation tools assume CMORised, regular-grid CMIP-style data, while ACCESS ocean and sea-ice outputs often involve native tripolar grids, model-specific conventions, and variables that require careful preprocessing or regridding. We therefore discuss the practical role of CMORisation, ACCESS-MOPPy, regridding strategies, and metadata standardisation in making ocean diagnostics easier to run, compare, and reproduce.
Rather than presenting a finished framework, this talk aims to outline the current direction, identify technical bottlenecks, and invite COSIMA community input on priority diagnostics, acceptable regridding approaches, and how best to integrate ACCESS-OM evaluation into shared CMIP7-era workflows.