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Title: Managing complexity in simulations of land surface and near-surface processes

Journal Article · · Environmental Modelling and Software
 [1];  [1];  [2]
  1. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
  2. Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)

Increasing computing power and the growing role of simulation in Earth systems science have led to an increase in the number and complexity of processes in modern simulators. We present a multiphysics framework that specifies interfaces for coupled processes and automates weak and strong coupling strategies to manage this complexity. Process management is enabled by viewing the system of equations as a tree, where individual equations are associated with leaf nodes and coupling strategies with internal nodes. A dynamically generated dependency graph connects a variable to its dependencies, streamlining and automating model evaluation, easing model development, and ensuring models are modular and flexible. Additionally, the dependency graph is used to ensure that data requirements are consistent between all processes in a given simulation. Here we discuss the design and implementation of these concepts within the Arcos framework, and demonstrate their use for verification testing and hypothesis evaluation in numerical experiments.

Research Organization:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States); Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC05-00OR22725; AC52-06NA25396; 20110068DR; LA-UR-14-25386
OSTI ID:
1261343
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1321744; OSTI ID: 1353127
Report Number(s):
LA-UR-14-25386; KP1702030; ERKJ292
Journal Information:
Environmental Modelling and Software, Vol. 78; ISSN 1364-8152
Publisher:
ElsevierCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 43 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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A component-based approach to integrated modeling in the geosciences: The design of CSDMS journal April 2013
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A functional test platform for the Community Land Model journal May 2014

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Modeling the role of preferential snow accumulation in through talik development and hillslope groundwater flow in a transitional permafrost landscape journal October 2018
The multi-assumption architecture and testbed (MAAT v1.0): R code for generating ensembles with dynamic model structure and analysis of epistemic uncertainty from multiple sources journal January 2018
Feedbacks Between Surface Deformation and Permafrost Degradation in Ice Wedge Polygons, Arctic Coastal Plain, Alaska journal March 2020
Accelerating AIREBO: Navigating the Journey from Legacy to High‐Performance Code journal February 2019
Microtopographic control on the ground thermal regime in ice wedge polygons journal January 2018