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Project Progress

The Virtual Planetary Laboratory interface and integration team has developed the proto-type VPL Online Community Tool. The tool allows VPL community users to access steady-state Earth climate and chemistry components coupled through a SQL database, with the added ability to compute synthetic spectra of the model results. The core components of the model are integrated using a custom set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). In addition, the distributed computing network manages several parallel, independent calculations in spectrum generation, improving the performance of the most time-intensive portion of the model.

Specific Progress includes:

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  Development of APIs: The draft specification for the VPL interface has been translated into a functioning F95 library that can be used by any VPL module. Modules can now connect to and initialize MySQL databases, read/write scalar data and vector arrays, and have the ability to record model progress in the history database through history log functions.
• Development of the online ‘Planet Drafter’ tool: The ‘Planet Drafter’ allows users to load database parameters from pre-defined templates, modify these, or upload custom templates. Online development tools are available that allow users to query database parameters and plot the results of model runs.
• Integration of climate code and chemistry code using the online tools and the VPL API: Modified versions of Jim Kasting’s climate code and chemistry code are now integrated using the framework provided by Planet Drafter and the VPL API. The full parameter space has yet to be tested, but convergent, coupled climate-chemistry models for the present-day earth have been achieved.
• Synthetic spectrum calculation: The VPL allows users to compute synthetic spectra from the results of the coupled climate/chemistry model. Users choose the atmospheric components to include in the model, and the job manager distributes independent line-by-line absorption calculations automatically on the computing cluster.

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