Community survey on features for potential removal from CAM

Take the survey here via a Google form to add your comments and suggestions

Community survey on features for potential removal from future versions of CAM

As some of you heard at the AMWG meeting held February 2022, we are looking for ways to reduce the workload on our software engineering group. Continued maintenance and testing of physics configurations and dynamical cores in the ongoing development stream of CAM/CESM represents a significant burden in terms of software engineering person-hours.

It is important to emphasize that any features that are removed from the development stream will only be available in existing releases of the model. To be clear, this means that such features will not be further developed, and will no longer be tested or supported to ensure continued compatibility with future versions of CAM/CESM.

A list of features for potential deprecation is given below. Each feature on the list was chosen in light of the following:

  1. Available and supported in CESM2.1
  2. No development (active research that affects the code or configuration) since the CESM2.1 release. This is based on activity in the CAM/CESM github repository - pull requests, commits etc., and also CAM ChangeLog entries.
  3. Takes up significant time for regression testing and/or has taken up software engineering group time to correct/debug in response to changes elsewhere in the code
  4. Easy to remove (i.e., we are trying to optimize software engineering group time)

We acknowledge that each feature listed below represents a valuable scientific contribution to CAM. Proposed removal from the development stream of CAM is based on an assessment of the level of community research activity that uses these features in ongoing CAM development. We emphasize again that any features that are removed from the development stream will still be available in existing releases of the model.

Please review the list below. Your comments and suggestions can be added in the Google form. We hope that with your input we will be able to implement a plan that utilizes our software engineering resources in the most effective way.

List of candidate features for removal from CESM development stream and timeline for removal:

  • 1-6 Months
    • Super Parameterized CAM (SPCAM)
    • CAM3-physics
    • UNIfied CONvection Scheme (UNICON)
    • Microphysics for Zhang McFarlane deep convection(ZM microphysics)
  • 6 Months-1 year
    • Eulerian spectral transform dynamical core (EUL dycore)