ESCOMP
Revisit scientific support for compsets prior to release
What is the feature/what would you like to discuss?
science_support needs to be reevaluated for the CAM7 release and set appropriately in config_compsets.xml in the release branch. All references to scientific support in the CAM development branch should be removed.
Is there anyone in particular you want to be part of this conversation?
No response
Will this change (regression test) answers?
No
Will you be implementing this enhancement yourself?
Any CAM SE can do this
I want to make sure I understand what science_support means. In chatting with @tilmes, I want to verify I'm not giving her bad information. I emailed her my understanding of science support:
"My understanding is that cam6 is only supported scientifically in cesm2.1.X. As soon as we bring in science changes that are invoked by cam6 compsets, they are no longer scientifically supported, and have been relegated to functional support. For example, the convective scavenging changes we brought into non CAM-Chem configurations changed the cloud quite a bit, and RESTOM is no longer guaranteed to be ~0 in B1850. The head of the trunk doesn't scientifically support anything. Only official CESM release tags may contain scientifically supported configurations."
In particular, "The head of the trunk doesn't scientifically support anything ..." is a pretty sweeping statement and so I want bounce it off for discussion here.
The understanding has always been that simulations are provided with a 'scientifically supported' compset (commonly B1850; maybe BHIST) which have been ok'd by the working groups, and that we in some way understand the climate performance. I guess if the convection changes you describe provide solutions that deviate from the supported simulations then it just becomes functionally supported. Unless you redo simulations I guess.
Saw this link on ESCOMP/CAM: https://github.com/ESCOMP/CAM/wiki/CAM-Testing. I don't think it's accurate to refer to all these grid/compset pairs as scientifically supported. But I guess that's up for debate.
I believe these were gleaned from the cime_config/config_compsets.xml file. The list of "science supported" was decided by various scientists before the last release. They should probably have been removed after the release was made and answers started changing. This issue was opened specifically so that we decide what compset/grid configuration are "scientifically supported" prior to the next release.