Software Testing and Verification in Climate Model Development

Over the past 30 years, most climate models have grown from relatively simple representations of a few atmospheric processes to complex multidisciplinary systems. Computer infrastructure over that period has gone from punchcard mainframes to modern parallel clusters. Model implementations have becom...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE software Vol. 28; no. 6; pp. 49 - 55
Main Authors: Clune, T. L., Rood, R. B.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Los Alamitos IEEE 01.11.2011
IEEE Computer Society
Subjects:
Atmospheric measurements
Atmospheric modeling
Automation
Climate change
Computational modeling
Computer programming
Global warming
Infrastructure
Meteorology
Numerical models
program verification
Software development
Software engineering
Software reliability
testing and debugging
testing strategies
United States > US
ISSN:0740-7459, 1937-4194
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Over the past 30 years, most climate models have grown from relatively simple representations of a few atmospheric processes to complex multidisciplinary systems. Computer infrastructure over that period has gone from punchcard mainframes to modern parallel clusters. Model implementations have become complex, brittle, and increasingly difficult to extend and maintain. Verification processes for model implementations rely almost exclusively on some combination of detailed analyses of output from full climate simulations and system-level regression tests. Besides being costly in terms of developer time and computing resources, these testing methodologies are limited in the types of defects they can detect, isolate, and diagnose. Mitigating these weaknesses of coarse-grained testing with finer-grained unit tests has been perceived as cumbersome and counterproductive. Recent advances in commercial software tools and methodologies have led to a renaissance of systematic fine-grained testing. This opens new possibilities for testing climate-modeling-software methodologies.
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ISSN:0740-7459
1937-4194
DOI:10.1109/MS.2011.117