A Web-based Visual Analytic System for Understanding the Structure of Community Land Model

Development of high fidelity earth system models is important to the understanding of earth system science. Along with several decades of active developments, the complexity of the model’s software structure became a barrier that hinders model interpretation and further improvements. In this paper, a web-based visual analytic system is introduced to better understand the software structure of Community Land Model (CLM) within an earth system modeling framework. First, the software structure is decomposed from source codes and we use a graph structure to represent the interrelationships among different CLM components. Second, a web-based front end is developed to demonstrate the CLM software structure in a visual analytical context. Finally, we present a pilot case study to discuss how an improved understanding of CLM software structure can be achieved from three different perspectives, namely CLM structure overview, visualization of submodel structure and CLM inter-version comparison. We believe the approaches and visualization tools can be beneficial to CLM model interpretation and improvements as well as other large-scale modeling systems across different research domains.