Looking to to see where help is needed!

[elenamiralles]

Hello Oceananigans!

I've recently been exploring this project as I'm super interested in ocean and climate modeling and I'm looking to learn more about where the industry sits right now. I love what you guys are doing and I'd love to contribute in some way.

I'm relatively new to Julia and Oceananigans but I have a good background with numerical methods and PDEs and I'm a fast learner. I could probably be most helpful with documentation (adding examples, clarifying explanations, etc.) or numerical methods (the math behind the algorithms).

Questions for the community:
Is there any interest in this kind of help right now? If so are there any particular problems that someone would recommend based on my level and background?

Happy to help in whatever way you all are looking for!

[glwagner]

Hi @elenamiralles ! All of the areas where we need help most desperately involve deep knowledge of the source code, including the algorithms that underpin the models (especially the hydrostatic model), kernel engineering, and performance optimization for distributed problems.

Documentation development is also very much needed! However, its hard to develop documentation without a priori practical knowledge of undocumented features. That said, we have an open issue that tries to compile all of the major things we feel need to be documented: #5349. You can comb through that and try to find something that might be a good starter project. Note, examples are not the best place to start, because we are not limited by developer time to implement examples (they are super easy to implement), but rather CI / computational resources (the examples must build every time the documentation builds, so we are only able to deploy a limited number of examples). However you are certainly welcome to look through the existing examples and contribute improvements where you see --- improving the existing examples probably won't incur much additional cost!

Another major effort on going right is the development of open boundary conditions for nesting within large-scale solutions. There are several issues and PRs open on this right now:

• Add a hydrostatic barotropic soliton case validation for hydrostatic open boundaries #5387
• Add flow over hill validation using open boundaries and a hydrostatic model with implicit surface #5359
• Open boundary conditions using SplitExplicitFreeSurface #5351
• Move velocity halo filling into rk3_substep! and ab2_step! for HydrostaticFreeSurfaceModel #5352

There are probably issue open as well that would be useful -- I suggest poking around.

I'll also point you to related packages which have less development effort than Oceananigans and could benefit from a large developer community for sure:

• Breeze, software for atmospheric modeling built on Oceananigans: https://github.com/NumericalEarth/Breeze.jl/
• NumericalEarth, software for coupled Earth system modeling: https://github.com/NumericalEarth/NumericalEarth.jl
• Terrarium, software for land modeling: https://github.com/NumericalEarth/Terrarium.jl

Hope that's helpful (even if a bit non-specific), happy to continue chatting about good starter projects!