Announcement: UFS Land Data Assimilation (DA) System v2.0.0 Released on 2024-10-30

[gspetro-NOAA]

The Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) and the Unified Forecast System (UFS) community are proud to announce the public release of the Land Data Assimilation (DA) System version 2.0.0. This release is an update to the version 1.2.0 release from December 2023 and reflects a number of changes currently available in the land-DA_workflow development branch. To improve the internal structure and maintainability of the UFS land-DA_workflow repository, developers have refactored the workflow to adhere more closely to the National Center for Environmental Prediction's (NCEP) Central Operations (NCO) Implementation Standards. Additionally, developers have incorporated the Unified Workflow (UW) Tools open-source Python package to improve Rocoto workflow generation and automate common Land DA tasks needed for standard numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems. The new release includes the following feature updates:

• Updated configuration:
  • Coupled configuration with UFS Weather Model (WM) Noah-MP land component and the data atmosphere (DATM) component
  • Global C96 resolution data provided for a Jan. 1-31, 2000 analysis experiment.
  • Workflow refactoring to adhere to NCO Implementation Standards
  • Removed standalone land-driver and vector2tile components (PR Remove land driver and vector2tile #129)
  • Removed land driver from CTest (PR remove land_driver from ctest #123)
• Workflow updates:
  • Updated directory structure for NCO compliance (e.g., PR Change structure of output and log directories #75, PR Add build script and move build-related files to sorc dir #49, and many other PRs)
  • Incorporation of uwtools rocoto tool to produce the Rocoto workflow XML file from a YAML configuration file (PR add initial jobs and parm #47)
  • Incorporation of uwtools template tool to render a configuration file from a template (PR Generate Rocoto YAML file from template #153)
  • Added cycled run capability (PR Add cycled-run capability #101)
  • Added workflow end-to-end (WE2E) testing (PR Add WE2E verification capability #131)
  • Provided automated run option using cron (PR Add crontab capability #110)
  • Added analysis plotting task (PR Add new task to plot analysis #107)
• Software Prerequisites:
  • Upgraded to JEDI Skylab v7.0 (PR Update scripts to use JEDI skylab v7 #92)
  • Upgraded to spack-stack v1.6.0 (PR Update module files with Spack-stack 1.6.0 #102)
• RDHPCS Platform Deployment and Container Support:
  • Tier-1 Platforms: Hera, Orion, and Hercules
    • Added support for Hercules (PR Port land-DA workflow to Hercules #133, PR [develop]: Add Hercules info to docs #137)
    • Nightly Jenkins CTest runs on these three platforms
  • Singularity Containers:
    • Extended container support (PR Extend container support to all Tier 1 platforms #85)
    • Singularity container (ubuntu22.04-intel-landda-release-public-v2.0.0.img) includes updates to support changes since the v1.2.0 release on a broader array of platforms (PR Update Land DA container to Spack-Stack 1.6.0 #147).
• Observation Database Update: The Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) daily snow depth observation data have been processed with the JEDI IODA converter for January 1-31, 2000. The IODA-processed data is accessible via the Land DA data bucket.
• Documentation: The v2.0.0 User's Guide has been updated to reflect these improvements to the Land DA System, and test cases with all associated data files are also available to the public in the Land DA data bucket). Interested users can get support by submitting a question through the GitHub Discussions Q & A page.

For more information about this release, including contributors, see the full article on the EPIC website!