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ClimateGlobalChange / tempestextremes

Extreme weather detection and characterization
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Add ESMF mesh support to GenConnectivityFile #37

Open zarzycki opened 1 year ago

zarzycki commented 1 year ago

With the NUOPC coupler coming online in CESM (and elsewhere) there has been a push to use the ESMF mesh description format for unstructured grids (e.g., SE, MPAS) vs. SCRIP.

An example file on Cheyenne using MPAS is: /glade/work/zarzycki/grids/esmf/mpasa15natl_esmf.nc

While a user could use tools like uxarray (or ESMFPy etc.) to convert ESMF -> SCRIP -> GenConnectivityFile, it seems standard enough to just support in TE for generating connectivity information. There are also ESMFpy, NCL, etc. tools that go unstructured lat/lon arrays -> ESMF, so users might already have workflows that do that.

paullric commented 1 year ago

Any particular reason they're using the ESMF mesh description and not something UGRID compliant? It's easy to support both, but it seems strange that they wouldn't use the opportunity to move to a community standard.

zarzycki commented 1 year ago

To be honest, not sure. The ESMF mesh file in CIME is currently used for defining remap weights between components and also land/ocn partitioning. The NUOPC release notes implies UGRID is also supported for remapping, so it's possible UGRID-compliant files would also be pretty much plug and play with the NUOPC implementation in CESM. I'll take a look at some point and if it's not plug and play, maybe it's worth opening a ticket in CIME.