MPAS Version 3.0

This is a major feature release for the following MPAS models. Below, subsections include relevant changes from each core.

• MPAS Framework
  • As a significant step in preparing the MPAS framework for support of multiple MPAS cores being compiled together in the same executable, the internal storage of fields and namelist options has been rewritten; this change principally affects model developers who need to access fields inside the MPAS code.
  • To enable full run-time control over file input and output, a new I/O layer has been developed for MPAS. In past releases of MPAS, control over input, restart, and history files took place in the namelist file. Now, all configuration of model input, restart, and history files makes use of separate XML configuration files. A new chapter has been added to the core-specific users' guides to describe the use of this new I/O system.
• MPAS Atmosphere and Init-Atmosphere
  • Support for soil moisture and soil temperature from ERA-I levels (0-7, 7-28, 28-100, and 100-25 cm);
  • a significant reduction in the print statements written to the log files;
  • a reduction in the set of fields written to the default model history files; and
  • miscellaneous minor bugfixes.
• MPAS Land Ice
  • updates to support pools and streams
  • fix bug in calculation of slope used for SIA velocity
• MPAS Ocean
  • Support for Gent-McWilliams parameterization
  • Support for CVMix including support for KPP
  • Addition of the ocean analysis run mode including:
    • Global statistics analysis member
    • Zonal mean analysis member
  • Corrections for horizontal pressure gradient when using tilted layers

MPAS Version 2.1

The bugfix release addresses two issues in MPAS-Atmosphere:

1. The double-precision RRTMG long-wave table, RRTMG_LW_DATA.DBL, was inconsistent with the version of the RRTMG code that was included in MPAS-Atmosphere. The RRTMG_LW_DATA.DBL has been updated in the MPAS-Data repository, and the source code includes changes in the data checkout script to download the latest version of all WRF physics tables from this repository.

2. In two places in the MPAS-Atmosphere solver, the upwinding coefficient for the 3rd-order advection scheme, config_coef_3rd_order, was incorrectly declared as an integer rather than a real. The bug affects the diagnosis of the covariant vertical velocity omega, resulting in the use of a fourth-order diagnosis as opposed to the third-order diagnosis consistent with the horizontal transport.

MPAS Version 2.0

This release represents the second major release of MPAS including the
framework and all cores.

The Land Ice core is a new addition.

MPAS Version 1.5

This release corrects an indexing error in the computation of horizontal mixing for w.

Thanks to Matus Martini for finding this bug.

MPAS Version 1.4

Introduces corrections to the hydrostatic balancing in MPAS-A real-data initialization to properly account for vertical grid stretching.

MPAS Version 1.3

This release corrects syntax in the shell script that checks out MPAS-A physics lookup tables at build time.

MPAS Version 1.2

This release corrects an issue with certain compiler versions in which module variables were not being properly inherited. The changes in this release only affect the MPAS 'atmosphere' core.