Dr Paige Martin1, Jasmeen Kaur1, Davide Marchegiani1, Felicity Chun1, Heidi Nettelbeck1
1Australia's Climate Simulator (ACCESS-NRI), Canberra, Australia
Biography:
Jasmeen is a research software engineer working within the ACCESS-NRI User Training team. Jasmeen’s favourite aspect of her work is being a part of an amazing team to collaboratively work on improving the understanding of the fundamental nature of climate and climate variability.
Jasmeen completed a Bachelor of Advanced Computing (Honours) in 2022 at The Australian National University.
Abstract:
Documentation in computational climate modelling is rarely straightforward. Organising documentation is challenging – especially when it comes to complex climate models and tools. Researchers often require information that is spread across model documentation, tool-specific user guides, and output datasets. Hence, clear and well-organised documentation is essential to support the use of climate models and the learning of analysis tools. To tackle this scenario, Australia’s Climate Simulator (ACCESS-NRI) has developed ACCESS-Hive Docs – a unified documentation platform tailored to the Australian Community Climate and Earth-System Simulator (ACCESS) research community.
ACCESS-Hive Docs is a website that brings together information on ACCESS models and configurations, as well as model data analysis and evaluation tools into a single, user-friendly site. It supports a seamless user-facing, front-end experience while managing a more involved backend tailored to the requirements of the content. For instance, all our documentation is built using the Material for MkDocs framework, which provides a nice visual, customisable and searchable static web interface. Adhering to our open principles, most of the content is written in Markdown within GitHub repositories to encourage collaboration and contributions from the community.
In this presentation, we will demonstrate how we tackle different aspects of ACCESS-related model documentation within the ACCESS-Hive Docs. Our approach aims to achieve a balance between content accessibility for all users and development flexibility for contributors, ultimately aiming to provide a comprehensive curation of climate content for the Australian climate research community.