Clawpack v5.14.0 released

[Randall J LeVeque]

Dear Clawpack Users,

We are happy to announce that Clawpack 5.14.0 has been released.

GeoClaw users: please read about critical bug fixes!

This release includes a couple of important bug fixes that prevented GeoClaw from running properly in both 5.13.0 and 5.13.1.  In particular the Riemann solver was changed in a way that sometimes gives artifacts in the solution, particularly when viewing water velocities offshore.  Some changes in onshore inundation depths have also been observed, so GeoClaw users who performed critical simulations using one of those versions may want to consider comparing to the results obtained with 5.14.0, which reverts the problematic change.  For more details, see:
    https://github.com/clawpack/riemann/pull/187
    http://www.clawpack.org/release_5_14_0.html

Also, the new feature to allow more control over topo file ordering, described at
    https://www.clawpack.org/topo_order.html
set via setting the new setrun.py parameter to:
    rundata.topo_data.override_order = True
did not work as advertised, and may have used topo files in the wrong order. The default value of False still worked as always, so you only need to worry about this if you set this to True.  These bugs have been fixed in 5.14.0, and also a new "fudge factor" has been introduced that is used when determining whether two topo files have the same resolution or not (which could change the behavior going forward even when `override_order = False`, but hopefully makes it easier to understand what ordering will be used in this case). For more discussion see
    https://github.com/clawpack/geoclaw/issues/689

    https://www.clawpack.org/topo_order.html

On the positive side, some new tools have been introduced that may be useful to GeoClaw users; see the release notes.

A new set of tutorials is also being developed, specifically for applying GeoClaw to tsunami modeling, but many of the issues discussed (or to be discussed in future updates) will be of broader interest.  

Save the date: We are planning to have a virtual GeoClaw Users workshop on March 19-20, 2026, where we plan to have a series of short talks by users and developers about interesting applications or extensions of the code, interspersed with break-out sessions on Zoom for people interested in particular topics or tools to get together and share ideas.  More information to come soon, and if anyone is interested in giving a brief talk, please contact one of the GeoClaw developers.

How to get the latest version of Clawpack:

Please see
    http://www.clawpack.org/installing.html
for several installation options and the list of prerequisites.

A new tar file is available at:
    https://github.com/clawpack/clawpack/releases/

The tarfile is also permanently archived on Zenodo with DOI 10.5281/zenodo.18382457.
So if you publish results (and also, we hope, the code used to generate them) based on this version, you can rest assured that it will always be available to your readers.  For earlier versions, see
    http://www.clawpack.org/releases.html

Tar files for all recent releases can also now be referenced with the single DOI 10.17605/osf.io/kmw6h, convenient if you have used multiple versions in your work, or you want to cite a generic Clawpack DOI.   [Note: this link seems to be broken currently, we are investigating]

For more information on how best to cite Clawpack, please see
    http://www.clawpack.org/about.html#citing

Many thanks to everyone who contributed to this release. You can view all the commits, diffs, and contributors starting from the release notes page
    http://www.clawpack.org/release_5_14_0.html.

Happy Computing,
  The Clawpack Development Team