[mpas-developers] request to merge lateral_boundary branch to the trunk

[Todd Ringler]

Hi All,

We have been working on a clean implementation of lateral boundary  
conditions for a while now. Michael and I put together a design and  
requirement document on the top that was circulated for comments.

As near I can tell, we have successfully implemented this design in  
the shallow-water model and in the ocean model. Changes committed by  
Michael lead me to think that the design has also been pushed into the  
hydrostatic atmosphere model.

Over the next couple of days Mark Petersen will be doing a review and  
testing of the code under the lateral_boundary_conditions. His focus  
will be on the ocean model component. Over the last couple of weeks  
Mat Maltrud has been testing the shallow-water core with realistic  
boundaries. All of this testing has occurred in "MPI-mode" on numerous  
different platforms.

Some of the changes in this design occur under frameworks, so the push  
back to the trunk will impact all model components when rebuilt. As  
far as we can tell, these changes are innocuous to those not enforcing  
lateral boundary conditions.

A quick comparison of the shallow-water models in the branch and in  
the trunk show agreement out to ~12 digits  after 500 time steps in  
test case #5.

I am asking for suggestions in terms of testing and evaluation. We  
would like to merge this branch with the trunk very soon, but we want  
to be careful not to adversely impact the broader development effort.

Cheers,
Todd