Serendipity

One of the things that came up in our weekly brainstorming session today was the question of whether climate models can be made more modular, to permit distributed development, and distributed execution. Carolyn has already blogged about some of these ideas. Here’s a little bit of history for this topic.

First, a very old (well, 1989) paper by Kalnay et al,  on Data Interchange Formats, in which they float the idea of “plug compatibility” for climate model components. For a long time, this idea seems to have been accepted as the long term goal for the architecture for climate models. But no-one appears to have come close. In 1996, David Randall wrote an interesting introspective on how university teams can (or can’t) participate in climate model building, in which he speculates that plug compatibility might not be achievable in practice because of the complexity of the physical processes being simulated, and the complex interactions between them. He also points out that all climate models (up to that point) had each been developed at a single site, and he talks a bit about why this appears to be necessarily so.

Fast forward to a paper by Dickinson et al in 2002, which summarizes the results of a series of workshops on how to develop a better software infrastructure for model sharing, and talks about some prototype software frameworks. Then, a paper by Larson et al in 2004, introducing a common component architecture for earth system models, and a bit about the Earth System Modeling Framework being developed at NCAR. And finally, Drake et al.’s Overview of the Community Climate System Model, which appears to use these frameworks very successfully.

Now, admittedly I haven’t looked closely at the CCSM. But I have looked closely at the Met Office’s Unified Model and the Canadian CCCma, and neither of them get anywhere close to the ideal of modularity. In both cases, the developers have to invest months of effort to ‘naturalize’ code contributed from other labs, in the manner described in Randall’s paper.

So, here’s the mystery. Has the CCSM really achieved the modularity that others are only dreaming of? And if so how? The key test would be how much effort it takes to ‘plug in’ a module developed elsewhere…