ESMF 8.8.0 Released

[danrosen25]

Dear all,

The ESMF Core Team is pleased to announce the ESMF 8.8.0 release. It is now available for download at https://github.com/esmf-org/esmf/releases/tag/v8.8.0.

The 8.8.0 release of ESMF is backward compatible with ESMF 8.7.0 for all the interfaces that are marked as backward compatible in the Reference Manual. ESMF 8.8.0 introduces performance improvement, feature enhancement, and two bug fixes in different areas of the framework. Notably, the ESMF_StateReconcile() method has been fundamentally re-implemented in 8.8.0 to improve performance during the initialization phase of a coupled model. A new method ESMF_FieldEmptyReset() has been introduced to reset an ESMF Field back to a less complete field status. Extensions were made to the ESMF Geom class and NUOPC State metadata to add more capabilities and options for the user.

Although there are some API changes to add more options for users, in general this release requires no user code changes. However, please note that the following experimental methods that were not marked as backward compatible in previous releases are now removed in this version: ESMF_StateRead(), ESMF_StateWrite(), and ESMF_RouteHandlePrint(); this may require minor modifications to user code that contains the above methods.

In addition, ESMF 8.8.0 may introduce some bit-for-bit changes in second-order conservative weight calculation due to enhancements in the algorithm.

Lastly, ESMPy has been updated to support Python version 3.8 and above.

The ESMF team is grateful for the many years of support, ideation, feedback, testing, and code contributions that the ESMF user community has provided since its inception. We look forward to continuing this partnership with the community to further improve and add features to ESMF. As always, please utilize ESMF Discussions (https://github.com/orgs/esmf-org/discussions) or write [email protected] with any questions or issues concerning ESMF.

With best regards,
The ESMF Core Team