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Fix a bug in how landIceMask is computed #732

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merged 1 commit into from
Nov 19, 2023

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xylar
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@xylar xylar commented Nov 19, 2023

Before this fix, cells that were more than half land according to the remapped topography dataset but had been included in the ocean (through critical passages) were mistakenly being categorized as land ice simply because they were "not ocean".

With this fix, the landIceMask is computed based on where the landIceFracObserved from the remapped topography dataset is greater than 0.5. A new function is needed to compute this mask because this definition is not the same as the mask used to cull the mesh when ice-shelf cavities are excluded from the ocean domain.

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  • Document (in a comment titled Testing in this PR) any testing that was used to verify the changes

Before this fix, cells that were more than half land according
to the remapped topography dataset but had been included in the
ocean (through critical passages) were mistakenly being
categorized as land ice simply because they were "not ocean".

With this fix, the `landIceMask` is computed based on where the
`landIceFracObserved` from the remapped topography dataset is
greater than 0.5.  A new function is needed to compute this mask
because this definition is not the same as the mask used to cull
the mesh when ice-shelf cavities are excluded from the ocean
domain.
@xylar xylar added bug Something isn't working ocean sea ice labels Nov 19, 2023
@xylar xylar self-assigned this Nov 19, 2023
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xylar commented Nov 19, 2023

In the process of debugging topography smoothing, I noticed strange temperature values in cells around the North Atlantic. I traced this to an incorrect calculation of the landIceMask that incorporated land cells (that had been turned to ocean by critical passages) as well as land-ice cells.
land_ice_mask_natl

This is a serious bug that needs to be fixed in all E3SMv3 meshes with ice-shelf cavities!

@xylar
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xylar commented Nov 19, 2023

Testing

With this bug fix, I'm no longer seeing this issue with the ECwISC mesh:

land_ice_mask_natl

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@xylar Good catch. Thanks for your careful checking - better to find a bug than have it unknown.

@rljacob
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rljacob commented Nov 20, 2023

Were the temperature values strange but not unphysical? (Does MPAS-O issue a warning for unphysical temps?)

@xylar xylar mentioned this pull request Nov 20, 2023
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xylar commented Nov 20, 2023

Were the temperature values strange but not unphysical? (Does MPAS-O issue a warning for unphysical temps?)

The temperature values were different from the surrounding ocean but not unphysical (constant -1.8 C, which is the initial value we use under ice shelves).

MPAS-Ocean doesn't have any sanity checks that I'm aware of for unphysical temperature values short of NaNs.

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3 participants