Add a test that ensures that setting all_active = .true. doesn't change answers for gridcell averages

[billsacks]

Bill Sacks < sacks@ucar.edu > - 2016-06-13 20:37:51 -0600
Bugzilla Id: 2322
Bugzilla CC: erik@ucar.edu, rfisher@ucar.edu,

Changing which 0-weight points are active should not change answers for gridcell averages. If this does change answers, it indicates a bug: values in 0-weight patches or columns should not affect the gridcell averages.

I have found two bugs by doing a manual test like this: bug 1851 and bug 2321. (See notes in bug 1851 for more detailed thoughts.)

We should add an automated test of this. Specifically, it could do two runs: one out-of-the-box and one with all_active = .true. (probably with finidat = ' ', because it can be problematic to set all_active = .true. with an finidat file not set up for that situation - although maybe we could use an initial conditions file along with init_interp?) The gridcell-level history fields should be bit-for-bit identical in these two runs. We could do that with a mechanism similar to the current LII test. However, this will hopefully become more straightforward once CESM-Development/cime#146 is resolved - hopefully making it relatively trivial to create one-off tests like this.

[billsacks]

Bill Sacks < sacks@ucar.edu > - 2017-11-03 15:42:39 -0600

cime issue 146 and relevant follow-on issues have now been addressed, so it should be relatively easy to add a new test type like this.

In addition to doing a basic test, as suggested in the original comment, it could also be useful to include a transient test that has some columns (probably crop columns) going back and forth between non-zero-weight and zero-weight a few times (when they're non-zero-weight, they should stay that way for a few years to allow crops to actually grow). I think we'd expect final gridcell-average results to be the same regardless of whether the crop column stayed active or went inactive when it had 0 weight. This could be done with a single-point test. The point of this would be to catch problems with columns/patches going from active to inactive to active, as in #209 . However, catching these problems may rely on having the transition from active to inactive happen in the middle of the growing season.