Site Groups; Beta: SDA, emulator, PDA, MAESPA, LPJ-GUESS, TRY; Alpha: benchmarking

• Ability to aggregate collections of sites into groupings. This includes both well recognized networks (Amerflux, Fluxnet, LTER, NEON, etc) and user-defined collections of sites.
• Initial support for the MAESPA and LPJ-GUESS models. Neither is fully-operational via the web interface, but both should run with prescribed inputs. Alpha development on CLM, G'DAY, and MAAT also included.
• Generalization of the parameter data assimilation to be able to use a long list of alternative MCMC sampling schemes implemented in the BayesianTools R package (developed by the COST PROFOUND project) as well as a substantial revitalization and improvement of the emulator-based Bayesian calibration scheme.
• Beta release of a generalization of the Ensemble Kalman Filter state data assimilation code to dynamically estimate both states and process error. More general improvements and generalization in multivariate SDA
• Alpha development of benchmarking. These features require additional database schema changes and further development -- look for a working beta in the next release. Key new concepts include a generalization of data loading based on MIME-type and format, a generalization of model-data alignment, and the beginning of a catalog of skill scores and other statistical metrics.
• Code for merging TRY database into local BETY instance. Because TRY is not public, we are not loading it globally into the database but rather providing tools to allow users to easily upload their own TRY data dumps.
• Various bug fixes in meteorology
• Improvements in RTM package supporting stand-level inversion / calibration

VM available from NCSA