Tracking one field in all (or several) CAM7 development runs

[PeterHjortLauritzen]

New feature type

Other (please explain below)

What is this new feature?

For CAM7 development it would be useful to be able to make a series of plots of one field (say PRECT, JJA) as a function of "changes in CAM7". Not exactly sure how to do this but perhaps a series of plots in chronological order of all the runs Cecile is doing in https://github.com/NCAR/amwg_dev

This would help to identify when a certain field changed significantly which is currently the case for PRECT without having to look through the diagnostics for each run ...

Assistance required?

Yes, I am requesting a new feature but won't have time to develop it

Extra info

No response

[brianpm]

Two incomplete thoughts about this.

1. I think the Taylor plots might be useful for this. The config/YAML file would have to provide the correct list of CAM runs. If the desired field is not one of the standard ones in the current Taylor diagram, the script could be modified to include that field (or only look at that field).
2. The other idea is that we might be able to use the CSV files that are generated from the table script(s). Right now the statistics are only global, but that could be changed. This would be more of an AMP_Toolbox kind of script, but one could mine those files for the global statistics and track changes through a series of runs. ADF would have to run on each of the cases to generate the table data, and the script would need to know where to look for the files.

I'm not sure if either would actually be the best way to do it, but those were my first thoughts for what could be done pretty easily with the current ADF.

[nusbaume]

Another option that I know @andrewgettelman has mentioned is the addition of a multi-case panel plot where multiple runs are all plotted against a single baseline or observational dataset on a single figure (with one figure per variable). This could also provide a quick check on how a particular variable is doing over multiple runs.

The problem of course is that this panel plot doesn't exist yet, but if it sounds like something you are looking for then we can make an issue for it and put it relatively high on the to-do list.