Developer's Committee: 12 September 2019

Last edition: Wikinfo(changed_ts)? by Wikinfo(changed_by)?



The usual end of the year meeting of Developer's Committee will took place on Thursday 12 September 2019 afternoon (2:00 pm - 5:00 pm) by videoconference.

The expected participants at this meeting are the members of Developer’s Committee: Consortium and External experts, including the leaders of each NEMO Working Group, and the NEMO System Team members as permanent invitees.

The NEMO Developers Committee subgroup (Mike Bell, Dorotea Iovino, Julien Le Sommer, Claire Lévy) prepared the meeting agenda.

Minutes

Present: Mike Bell (Chair and Met-Office Consortium expert, leader HPC WG)), Rachid Benshila (CNRS Consortium expert), Momme Butenschon (CMCC Consortium expert), Clement Bricaud, Miguel Castrillo, Jérome Chanut (leader AGRIF WG, Mercator Consortium expert), Stefania Ciliberti, Emanuela Clementi (co leader Air sea interactions WG-), Massimiliano Drudi, Frédéric Dupont (external expert), Italo Epicoco, Pier Giuseppe Fogli (CMCC Consortium expert), Joel Hirschi (NOC Consortium expert), Dorotea Iovino(CMCC NEMO officer), Claire Lévy, (NEMO System Team leader), David Marshall (external expert), Sébastien Masson( CNRS NEMO officer, co leader Air sea interactions WG), Pierre Mathiot (Met-Office NEMO officer), Francesca Mele, Silvia Mocavero, George Nurser (NOC Consortium expert), Clément Rousset, Julien le Sommer (CNRS Consortium expert), Martin Vancoppenolle(co leader sea ice WG)

Apologies: Andrew Coward (NOC NEMO officer), Helene Hewitt (external expert), Gurvan Madec, Paolo Oddo (external expert)

There was a lot of trouble with the Webex system. M-O were unable to speak during the meeting.

1. Proposals for WGs and reorganisation of NEMO Developers’ Committee (NDC) year

See attached presentation​

The proposed re-organisation of the roles of the Working Group Leaders and the split of the NDC into a Scientific Advisory Committee and an internal NDC was supported. The NEMO Steering Committee will be asked to approve it.

The frequency of the SAC meetings was discussed; once every 2-3 years is probably appropriate. A “light” meeting once a year is a possible alternative.

2. Overview of the time-line for actions expected by the end of the year

See attached presentation​

Following the 2019 workplan, some major development work will be completed by end 2019 including new features, efficiency, reliability, visibility and preparing future. However Claire flagged that the number of actions completed is small compared with those listed in the initial workplan. By end 2019, there will remain:

• a number of “ongoing” actions, because some actions should have been more clearly labelled as what is expected during the year, some actions have been missing work time, and some have faced unexpected difficulties. In a realistic workplan, only the later should be “ongoing”
• a number of “not started actions” due to lack of time

In summary, the 2019 workplan was still not realistic whereas it was expected to be. This may be related to the ambitions of IMMERSE: the 2019 workplan includes also IMMERSE 2020 actions, that can partly explain the “not-started actions”. Nonetheless, it is important that the vast majority of the yearly workplan’s actions is completed by the end of the year.

Claire raised two specific questions that were discussed in some detail:

• A) Who puts the priority on work-plan actions? SAC and Working Groups should clearly have roles. it was proposed that the WGs make stronger inputs to the construction of the workplan and that their leaders report on progress against the work-plan at the end of each year. The leaders of WG agreed with this proposal. The WGLs will be asked to vet the 2020 Work Plan. This could give a significant improvement to our prioritisation process.

Action: NDCSG to ask WGLs to vet the 2020 Work Plan before mid November (in order for NDC to propose a 2020 workplan for end 2019).

• B) How to keep NEMO alive in 10 years ? This provoked several ideas: how to make code development attractive to a new generation; how to entrain better the scientific community in NEMO development; how to make choices to keep NEMO coherent & at the forefront of ocean modelling. This could be a topic for a focused discussion at a SAC meeting.

3. Proposals for sharing of configurations (see attached presentation)

See attached presentation​

Julien’s presentation provides information on a schematic of the system that will be implemented as part of the IMMERSE project in the next few months. He asked for volunteers, particularly from the System Team to review. NOC and Met Office said they expect to volunteer. This work will clearly be very important in supporting the use of NEMO, but sharing configurations of projects using NEMO is not part of NEMO developers tasks, so will not be included in the NEMO work-plan.

4. Report on verification and validation discussions

See attached presentation​

Seb and Dorotea emphasised the importance of verification and validation, both for users and developers. Up to now, it was visible in the workplan through the validation stream, but some work has now started to improve the work and the methods. The proposed approach was supported. Seb is keen to be part of the drafting group and CMCC will find a suitable volunteer.

5. Physical processes sub-groups

See attached presentation​

It was agreed that this is a tricky issue and to try out Julien’s proposal.

Action: NDCSG to propose a short-list of topics to be discussed and the expected outcomes and to initiate one or two groups “tasked” with evaluating the options and priorities for NEMO on these topics.

6. AOB

We probably need a meeting of the new NDC to vet the 2020 Work Plan. The natural date would be directly after the merge party (in December 2019).

Future meetings of both the NDC and the SAC should seek to make the presentations and questions available at least 2-3 days before the meeting so that attendees can consider the issues in advance.

The minutes from the meeting will be forwarded to the NEMO Steering Committee for discussion at their next meeting.

List of participants

Name	Role	Connected from
Mike Bell	Chair	Met Office - Exeter
Claire Lévy		LOCEAN- Paris
Dorotea Iovino		CMCC - Bologna
Emanuela Clementi		CMCC - Bologna
Italo Epicoco		CMCC - Lecce
Silvia Mocavero		CMCC - Lecce
Francesca Mele		CMCC - Lecce
Rachid Benshila (->16h)		LEGOS - Toulouse
Martin Vancoppenolle (->16h00 ! subway strike)	SIWG co--lead	LOCEAN - Paris
Jérôme Chanut	AGRIF WG leader	MOI - Toulouse
Stefania Ciliberti		CMCC - Lecce
Julien Le Sommer		CNRS - Grenoble
Joel Hirschi		NOC - Southampton
George Nurser		NOC - Southampton
Miguel Castrillo / Oriol Tintó		BSC
David Marshall (from 1430 CEST)		Oxford
Tomas Lovato		CMCC - Bologna

Videoconference connection information

Important: the videoconference RENATER has been replaced by webex, see Mike Bell's message or connection information below

Mike Bell invites you to join this Webex meeting.
Meeting number (access code): 846 481 207
Meeting password: pfzQA32h
Thursday, September 12, 2019
12:30 pm | (UTC+00:00) Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London | 3 hrs 20 mins
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