Software engineering for scientific application: Effort report on the community land model within the earth system modeling framework

One key factor in the improved understanding of earth system science is the development and improvement of high fidelity models. Along with the deeper understanding of earth system processes, the software complexity of those modelling systems becomes a barrier for further rapid model improvements and validation. In this paper, we present our experience on better understanding of the community land model (CLM) within an earth system modeling framework. After the science and software background of CLM, we represent three groups of CLM software engineering practices, which aim to 1) better understand the software system for rapid software system development on future computing platforms; 2) facilitate new model development via model-data comparison at field measurement level; 3) engage broad user communities via web services and cloud computing. Since better software engineering practices are much needed for general scientific software systems as we are adapting the integrated environmental modeling methodology, we hope those considerations can be beneficial to many other environmental modeling research programs involving multiscale system dynamics.