Deprecate and remove the VIC-Hydro option
The VIC-Hydro option was put in 12 years ago as an experimental optional hydrology method. It has NOT been used by default and is NOT tuned for the latest physics. It also requires additional fields on the surface datasets. And as such we've only supported it for two resolutions out of the box. We haven't heard about users using it as well. VIC hydrology is also not something being actively developed currently either. And as such we are planning on deprecating and removing the VIC option.
Definition of Done:
- [x] Remove the extra complexity in mksurfdata_esmf and it's python scripts to handle it
- [x] Remove building of special datasets with VIC fields on them (we should do this as part of the ctsm5.3.0 dataset update)
- [x] Add it to the README files as a deprecated feature along with the other deprecated features
- [x] Remove VIC-hydro from our testlists
- [ ] Change the namelist option so it dies with a warning that can be overridden
- [ ] Remove the namelist option from the code, so it's hardwired to false
- [ ] Remove the code to handle VIC
The first four items were accomplished as part of ctsm5.3.0
I cleaned up some unnecessary use_vichydro=.true. / .false. options in #2834 while updating namelist_defaults_ctsm.xml.