Serendipity

This week I’m visiting NCAR, in Colorado.

As it’s my first visit, I’m still blown away by the beauty of the place – both the location and the building itself (which was designed by I M Pei, the architect better known for the Louvre pyramid). I’m hoping to get some time today to visit the hiking trails around the facility.

Anyway, I gave my talk yesterday, and have had many interesting chats with the scientists and the software engineering team working on the Community Climate System Model (CCSM).

My plan is to do a detailed comparison of the software development practices at NCAR with what I saw in my Hadley study. There seem to be more similarities than differences, but three differences that have struck me so far are:

• the much greater use of multi-site development (which I expected – it is a community model, after all);
• the fact that each part of the coupled model (ocean, atmosphere, land, sea ice,…) has a distinct stand-alone identity, each with its own release cycle, which means there are some interesting challenges negotiating the (sometimes) conflicting needs for the stand-alone models, versus the CCSM coupled model;
• a much longer release cycle – years between official releases, compared to the Hadley’ Centre’s four month release cycle.

We speculated that the length of the release cycles might be largely to do with the major uses of the model. At the Hadley Centre, the climate and weather forecasting models are unified in a single code base. The weather forecasters need regular model improvements to meet annual targets for forecast improvements, and also need to make sure they are using a stable, robust model version (never a pre-release experimental one). Hence a short release cycle makes sense. At NCAR, the main driver for official releases is the IPCC assessment process, which operates on a 5-year cycle. Hence, carefully maintained official releases are only needed every few years. Meanwhile, scientists who want a more up-to-date model can play with unreleased experimental versions at their own risk, if they choose. Creating and supporting an official release takes a large software engineering overhead, and the resources just aren’t available to do it very often, in part because funding agencies much prefer to fund the science, rather than the software infrastructure needed to support that science. The lack of resources for software support seems to be a consistent problem across all the modeling centres I’ve visited so far.