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spencerahill / aospy

Python package for automated analysis and management of gridded climate data
Apache License 2.0
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Solution needed for Model-dependent Calc functions #44

Closed spencerkclark closed 8 years ago

spencerkclark commented 8 years ago

An issue I've encountered, particularly for more involved calculations which involve many variables, is that the way the calculation needs to be carried out varies depending on the model used. For a concrete example take computing the net column heating due to radiative, sensible, and latent heat fluxes. In a comprehensive GCM (like AM2) there is a term due to reflected shortwave radiation (swup_toa); this does not exist in the gray-atmosphere idealized moist model. In addition there are differences in how to handle the evaporative heat flux from the surface in each Model. Currently I address this by creating two separate calc functions and two separate variables linked with each calc function. This is rather inefficient, and I end up with two differently named variables representing the same physical quantity.

Another somewhat related situation that I encounter is that in some cases a variable is already computed in the model, while in others a variable needs to be computed from other variables. This is especially tricky to deal with when that variable is involved in another function; again I need to create separate functions and variables for each Model.

I'm not aware of any current (or numpy-legacy) infrastructure that is (was) in place that works to address this issue. I don't have a particularly good solution to either of these problems in mind at the moment -- I'll add one here if I think of one, but I just wanted to raise this issue while we are thinking about the next refactor of the object library.

spencerahill commented 8 years ago

I'm going to close this and suggest we continue the discussion on #3, since that's largely about the same issue.