sympl (v. 0.4.0) and climt (v. 0.15.3) – towards a flexible framework for building model hierarchies in Python

• Published in: Geoscientific Model Development 2018-09, Vol.11 (9), p.3781-3794
• Main Authors: Monteiro, Joy Merwin, McGibbon, Jeremy, Caballero, Rodrigo
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Best practices; Climate; Climate models; Climate system; Components; Configuration management; Configurations; Data analysis; Data processing; Data structures; Design; Design modifications; Earth; FORTRAN; Frameworks; Hierarchies; MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING; Modelling; Planets; Programming languages; Python; Submarine pipelines
• ISSN: 1991-9603; 1991-962X; 1991-959X; 1991-9603; 1991-962X
• DOI: 10.5194/gmd-11-3781-2018

sympl (System for Modelling Planets) and climt (Climate Modelling and Diagnostics Toolkit) are an attempt to rethink climate modelling frameworks from the ground up. The aim is to use expressive data structures available in the scientific Python ecosystem along with best practices in software design to allow scientists to easily and reliably combine model components to represent the climate system at a desired level of complexity and to enable users to fully understand what the model is doing. sympl is a framework which formulates the model in terms of a state that gets evolved forward in time or modified within a specific time by well-defined components. sympl's design facilitates building models that are self-documenting, are highly interoperable, and provide fine-grained control over model components and behaviour. sympl components contain all relevant information about the input they expect and output that they provide. Components are designed to be easily interchanged, even when they rely on different units or array configurations. sympl provides basic functions and objects which could be used in any type of Earth system model. climt is an Earth system modelling toolkit that contains scientific components built using sympl base objects. These include both pure Python components and wrapped Fortran libraries. climt provides functionality requiring model-specific assumptions, such as state initialization and grid configuration. climt's programming interface designed to be easy to use and thus appealing to a wide audience. Model building, configuration and execution are performed through a Python script (or Jupyter Notebook), enabling researchers to build an end-to-end Python-based pipeline along with popular Python data analysis and visualization tools.