Using Julia for Earth and climate science has the potential to combine the best of both worlds: The speed of Fortran and the interactivity and productivity of Python, empowering users to be developers and developers to be users. In this minisymposium speakers will present software projects both from a user and a developer perspective. Talks are encouraged to discuss both use cases of existing software as well as the development of user-friendly software.
Solving the two-language problem, Julia blurs the line between users and developers. Julia software in Earth and climate science often spans multiple aspects including models and their development, preparing and running simulations, data post-processing, analysis and visualisation. Users can easily extend packages, increasing the number of contributors, while developers enhance the user interface and experience within a unified language framework. At the same time, developers start to support other software packages and tools directly given the single language framework, further growing the ecosystem.
Traditionally, Earth and climate science relied on Fortran for performance-critical software and, more recently, on Python for data analysis and visualisation. Unfortunately, this puts a divide between developers and users, at least partially counteracting the gained productivity through Python. Julia as an emerging language framework has allowed this community to rethink how to build software with and for users, of which we want to highlight efforts from both the developer but especially the user perspective. Overall we want to accelerate research on Earth and climate science, which not just depends on high-performance computing but particularly on the user interface being accessible, intuitive, interactive and extensible.
We invite both developers and users, as well as individuals who bridge these roles, to discuss software projects and their impact on user empowerment. We also welcome talks by developer-user pairs highlighting the co-benefits from a combined perspective. For this minisymposium, we accept abstracts on every field in and adjacent to Earth and climate sciences, including but not limited to
- Atmospheric sciences, including atmospheric dynamics, physics, chemistry and climatology
- Oceanography including sea ice and ocean biogeochemistry
- Earth science including land surface processes, hydrology and glaciology
- Land vegetation and interactions of ecosystems with the climate
- Geodynamics, seismology, geodesy and geochemistry
- Human and physical geography
- Climate policy and economics including integrated assessment models
Talks can focus on software that solves equations, analyses or visualises data, processes measurements and especially software with any combination of the above. Talks on planetary sciences are equally welcome especially when they parallel the issues and opportunities to the fields mentioned.
Chairs
- Skylar Gering (Caltech)
- Francesco Martinuzzi (Leipzig)
- Milan Klöwer (MIT)