Short communication: Landlab v2.0: a software package for Earth surface dynamics

Barnhart, Katherine R., Hutton, Eric W. H., Tucker, Gregory E., Gasparini, Nicole M., Istanbulluoglu, Erkan, Hobley, Daniel E. J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2371-0534, Lyons, Nathan J., Mouchene, Margaux, Nudurupati, Sai Siddhartha, Adams, Jordan M. and Bandaragoda, Christina 2020. Short communication: Landlab v2.0: a software package for Earth surface dynamics. Earth Surface Dynamics 8 (2) , pp. 379-397. 10.5194/esurf-8-379-2020

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Abstract

umerical simulation of the form and characteristics of Earth's surface provides insight into its evolution. Landlab is an open-source Python package that contains modularized elements of numerical models for Earth's surface, thus reducing time required for researchers to create new or reimplement existing models. Landlab contains a gridding engine which represents the model domain as a dual graph of structured quadrilaterals (e.g., raster) or irregular Voronoi polygon–Delaunay triangle mesh (e.g., regular hexagons, radially symmetric meshes, and fully irregular meshes). Landlab also contains components – modular implementations of single physical processes – and a suite of utilities that support numerical methods, input/output, and visualization. This contribution describes package development since version 1.0 and backward-compatibility-breaking changes that necessitate the new major release, version 2.0. Substantial changes include refactoring the grid, improving the component standard interface, dropping Python 2 support, and creating 31 new components – for a total of 58 components in the Landlab package. We describe reasons why many changes were made in order to provide insight for designers of future packages. We conclude by discussing lessons about the dynamics of scientific software development gained from the experience of using, developing, maintaining, and teaching with Landlab.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Earth and Environmental Sciences
Publisher:	European Geosciences Union (EGU) / Copernicus Publications
ISSN:	2196-6311
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	15 June 2020
Date of Acceptance:	9 May 2020
Last Modified:	04 May 2023 17:43
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/132442

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