pyGOTM Lake Erken validation note

[alinbobolea]

Hello GOTM community,

I’ve published a technical note on validating pyGOTM against 22 years of Lake Erken data. It covers challenges, remaining differences with gotm-lake, and FABM limitations.

https://alinbobolea.github.io/blog/pygotm-lake-erken-parity/

Thank you,
Nick

[bolding]

Hi Nick

I enjoyed your story about your battle with the lake branch of GOTM.

The short story is that the lake branch was developed to fill a need for 1D lake modeling. Other models did exist but the main requirement of FABM support was not available. After the implementation the lake branch was adopted by some groups but none of the original GOTM people had projects including lake work - and equally important it was not possible to raise funding for maintaining the branch (with the aim to merge in the main branch) and therefor work on the lake branch was abandoned around 2019. Since then FABM has been developed further and at some point the GOTM/lake specific hacks were dropped - GOTM/lake was anyway not maintained. As GOTM has also developed since 2019 re-activitating support for lakes is now not a minor/trivial task and is likely not going to happen.

Karsten

[alinbobolea]

Hi Karsten,

Thank you for the historical perspective. The changes I make to pyGOTM intend to close the gap in the lake modeling and make those capabilities available alongside the latest GOTM version capabilities.

Best regards,
Nick

[bolding]

Hi Nick

Out of interest ...

The Fortran -> Python translation - on a scale from purely manual to purely AI where do you think this work is?

Best regards,
Karsten

[alinbobolea]

Hi Karsten,

My perception at this time is 5% manual / 95% AI. Nevertheless, the 5% is the critical component because it drives the architecture, validation, human judgement, course correction, all the effort that makes the Python translated code generate reasonable and physical results.

Best regards,
Nick