Building Confidence in the Community Ice Sheet Model (CISM) with LIVVkit, the Land Ice Validation and Verification Toolkit

Abstract:

Using an ice flow model to make inferences of real world systems requires a high level of confidence in the model. Verification and validation (V&V) is a set of techniques that are used to quantify confidence and build credibility.

We are developing LIVVkit (Land Ice Verification and Validation toolkit), a comprehensive V&V toolkit for ice sheet models, to help scientists make robust inferences of real world systems with their models. LIVVkit is written in python, due to its wide usage throughout the scientific community and should be easily accessible to a large number of users. The toolkit provides resources for data assimilation, verification testing, validation testing, and performance evaluations. A website is created automatically which presents the testing results in a comprehensive and user-friendly way. LIVVkit allows scientists and developers to implement reusable validation tests of model applications and build confidence in their ice flow model. Currently, we are working with scientific users and developers of the Community Ice Sheet Model (CISM) for the development of LIVVkit, but LIVVkit is designed to be extensible to other ice flow models.