[mpas-developers] question about EXPAND_LEVELS

[Michael Duda]

Hi, All.

I'm finishing up some changes to the WPS infrastructure that will make
it possible to specify any field dimension in the namelist (recall that
we are currently able to specify any non-decomposed dimension in the
namelist, i.e., any dimension other than nCells, nEdges, nVertices, and
nVertLevels); the primary application of this new functionality would be
in separate initialization executable, where we read in a grid file,
create a set of vertical levels at run-time, and write out an IC file
for the model.

In the process of making these changes, I thought we might now be able
to remove the EXPAND_LEVELS hack from the code; we currently use
EXPAND_LEVELS in the hydrostatic and non-hydrostatic cores, but we can
switch to defining the vertical dimension in a new namelist variable. My
question, then, was whether the ocean core relied on the use of
EXPAND_LEVELS in any critical way, or whether anyone was still
interested in using EXPAND_LEVELS with the shallow water core to test
with duplicated levels?

After a bit more testing, I think I'll be ready to propose the changes
this afternoon for review. Depending on any interest in keeping
EXPAND_LEVELS, I can either remove that code in my proposal, or keep it
intact.

Cheers,
Michael