Additional MPAS-seaice plots for snow analyses

[eclare108213]

Adding sea ice timeseries plots for snow volume and climatology plots for snow volume, broadband albedo, and ice area and volume tendencies due to thermodynamics and transport.

Checklist

• User's Guide has been updated

• Developer's Guide has been updated
• API documentation in the Developer's Guide (api.rst) has any new or modified class, method and/or functions listed
• Documentation has been built locally and changes look as expected
• Testing comment in the PR documents testing used to verify the changes

[eclare108213]

These plots are being added to enable a more comprehensive (but quick) analysis of an E3SM simulation campaign investigating the impacts of advanced snow physics processes in MPAS-seaice. The fields being added here (snow volume, albedo and the area and volume tendencies) are fundamental when considering any sea ice simulations.

For Testing please see
https://web.lcrc.anl.gov/public/e3sm/diagnostic_output/ac.eclare/E3SM-Project/MPAS_analysis/QC/Icepack_31ce422/sea_ice/index.html

Notes:

• In this first attempt to add new plots, I have not included observations of any kind. This will need to come later, with input from the sea ice data experts.
• There is a lot of duplicative code in this PR. For example, I would prefer to loop through all four tendencies in a single class, since they all need to be plotted exactly the same way. I would appreciate some guidance for how to do that, if it's possible and acceptable per MPAS-Analysis design.
• There are a few more fields that could be added, specific to snow. Most of them are present in only one simulation, with no data available in the other simulations. I’m not sure how to handle this situation.
• I do not understand what sets the plot sizes on the web page. Some of them are small, others are large.
• The color scales and other plot characteristics could be refined — this is a first attempt.
• I also cleaned up a few minor issues here and there.
• Once the code changes/additions in this PR are deemed suitable, I’ll work on the documentation.

How is authorship determined? I am happy to include whomever should be acknowledged on those lines (understanding that I modified the existing timeseries file and copied one of Darin's climatology files).

[xylar]

Sorry for the delay. I'm very excited to review this!

[eclare108213]

I'm adding a few more fields now - hold off a bit please - but I would appreciate your suggestions for how it could be done better / more efficiently.

[eclare108213]

I've added ridging diagnostics and updated some of the other fields, and remade all the plots for 1950-1999. E.g. see https://web.lcrc.anl.gov/public/e3sm/diagnostic_output/ac.eclare/E3SMv3/MPAS_analysis/1950-1999/snow_off/sea_ice/index.html

[xylar]

These additional plots look great!

One thing you may want to play around with is different colormaps for different fields. I at least really like being able to quickly distinguish between different fields based on colormap. There is a flag to mpas_analysis that makes it write out an image with all available colormaps:

mpas_analysis --plot_colormaps

That might be helpful.

[xylar]

Unable to view documentation change made in mpas-dev on chrysalis

If you copy them somewhere on the web portal, they should be viewable. If necessary, you can scp them to your laptop. However, I'll take a look at the docs as part of my review so no worries.

[xylar]

User's Guide has been updated

I think we need to add new entries in this directory for each new task. You should be able to copy the documentation for an existing task and delete the part about observations (since my understanding is that the new tasks don't have observations yet).

https://github.com/MPAS-Dev/MPAS-Analysis/tree/develop/docs/users_guide/tasks

The tasks will then need to be listed in the main index of tasks:
https://github.com/MPAS-Dev/MPAS-Analysis/blob/develop/docs/users_guide/analysis_tasks.rst?plain=1
so they get links in the documentation

[xylar]

After doing a test merge with develop to bring in 2 recent bug fixes, I was able to run my MPAS-Analysis test suite on this branch. The results of a very low-res analysis run (on a simulation at QU240 resoution) show that the plots are, indeed, being produced as expected:
https://web.lcrc.anl.gov/public/e3sm/diagnostic_output/ac.xasay-davis/analysis_testing/chrysalis/snow/main_py3.11/sea_ice/index.html

I'll run some tests on higher resolution runs as well as soon as I can. I just wanted to do some basic sanity checking first.

[eclare108213]

I updated the documentation on blues and scp'd it to my laptop to view. I hope it's complete now!

[xylar]

Wonderful, thank you! Looks good to me.

@darincomeau, do you have time to have a look at this in the next day or 2?

[xylar]

@darincomeau, if you can run analysis with this branch on one of the SORRM v3 simulations, that would be very helpful. I'll then sign off on the PR.

[xylar]

@eclare108213, my only remaining comment would be that I think maybe this colormap might be fairly low contrast and thus it might be difficult to distinguish different ridged ice thicknesses from one another. I grant you that the contouring makes the different levels pretty clear even so.

I very much like your other colormaps you've chosen.

[xylar]

Thanks, @eclare108213, I think those levels are certainly easier to distinguish. I imagine we will want to revisit the color maps and contour values down the road once we have some more experience with these plots across a variety of simulations. That has certainly been the case with similar plots in the past.

[eclare108213]

Yes, I also expect the contours and colors to be adjusted. I've just added a note to the docs regarding albedo. For quick-look comparisons across simulations at the same time, these plots can be helpful, but one needs to be extremely careful when looking at albedo across time. I included them because albedo is such an important part of the story for evaluating simulations with differing snow physics, but we might consider commenting them out going forward to emphasize "user beware".

[xylar]

Thanks for fixing these.

[xylar]

A copy-and-paste error in the last commit:

Suggested change

	An analysis task for plotting maps of Arctic sea ice broadband albedo.
	An analysis task for plotting maps of Antarctic sea ice broadband albedo.

[darincomeau]

@darincomeau, if you can run analysis with this branch on one of the SORRM v3 simulations, that would be very helpful. I'll then sign off on the PR.

Years 21 - 30 of the "alfred1" run:
https://web.lcrc.anl.gov/public/e3sm/diagnostic_output/ac.dcomeau/E3SMv3_dev/20241121.v3.SORRME3r3.piControl.alfred1.chrysalis/mpas_analysis/eclare-snow/yrs21-30/sea_ice/index.html

[darincomeau]

@eclare108213 this is alot of work, and so great to have these additional plots!

[xylar]

Thanks @darincomeau, for your plots.

And, yes, thanks @eclare108213 for this tremendous work and for all you had to do to figure out MPAS-Analysis to make it happen. This will make a huge difference in our ability to analyze sea ice going forward!