ESMF 8.5.0 released

[Gerhard Theurich - NOAA Affiliate]

Dear all,

The ESMF Core Team is pleased to announce the ESMF 8.5.0 release. It is now available for download at https://github.com/esmf-org/esmf/releases/tag/v8.5.0. Release notes and known issues are also available in the usual format on the ESMF website: https://earthsystemmodeling.org/static/releases.html#8_5_0.

The 8.5.0 release of ESMF comes with a few big new developments as well as improvements of existing functionality. The highlights of the 8.5.0 release are outlined in the following paragraphs, followed by a detailed list of release notes.

One major new development available with 8.5.0 is the addition of a hierarchical configuration class: ESMF_HConfig. This class provides YAML 1.2 support through the ESMF Fortran API. The ESMF_HConfig class integrates with the existing configuration class ESMF_Config for backward compatibility, and allows ESMF user code to seamlessly access, modify, and create information in YAML format. This new capability is leveraged within ESMF and NUOPC to provide a YAML alternative when specifying ESMF_Initialize() parameters, NUOPC attribute, petList, or run sequence information.

Another area that has seen a lot of new development is the Earth System Model eXecutable (ESMX) layer. ESMX has greatly matured in many areas since it was first introduced in the previous ESMF release and we believe it is now ready to be used by early adopters for “real world” applications. To this end, several new build options were added to the ESMX build configuration, and component building is now an integrated feature. The new ESMX_Builder command line tool eliminates the need for direct user interaction with the CMake system and improves the overall usability.

The ESMF Core Team will host ESMX training sessions in the Fall of 2023. If you’re interested in attending training sessions then sign-up to receive more information on the ESMX training form.

ESMF 8.5.0 adds a generic geometry class (ESMF_Geom) to support user code that deals generically with the existing geometry classes: ESMF_Grid, ESMF_Mesh, ESMF_LocStream, and ESMF_XGrid. Using the ESMF_Geom type, code will function regardless of the underlying geometry class. In this release only a few ESMF operations, such as Field creation, are overloaded to support the generic Geom type. Additional support will be added in future releases as the need arises.

Progress was also made in the area of multi-tile I/O support for Fields and Arrays, eliminating one of the restrictions of the previous release. Multi-tile Fields with ungridded dimensions, and multi-tile Arrays with undistributed dimensions are now fully supported.

With respect to installation and portability of the library, support for Spack and Docker continues to be an important focus. ESMF core team members are now maintainers of the official ESMF Spack package, and automated daily testing ensures continued support of this build option. Docker images are available and maintained under the ESMF organization on Docker Hub.

Incremental progress, bug fixes, and performance improvements were made in sevaral other areas of the framework, including the ESMF_RegridWeightGen application, Mesh creation, Regridding, RouteHandle re-use, and others. Please see the release notes below for a comprehensive list of changes.

For a full list of release notes and known issues see https://github.com/esmf-org/esmf/releases/tag/v8.5.0 or https://earthsystemmodeling.org/static/releases.html#8_5_0.

As always, please write esmf_s...@ucar.edu with any questions or issues concerning ESMF.

With best regards,

The ESMF Core Team