A future-ready Open Global Glacier Model (OGGM)

冰川是许多景观的显著特征，其全球萎缩已成为气候变化的标志。冰川是地质灾害的一个来源，是世界上许多地区下游人口可用水的重要调节者，也是海平面上升的一个主要因素。随着地球观测和数值模拟的最新进展，出现了一个新的冰川学分支（“全球尺度冰川学”）来估计世界上所有20万个冰川的体积，以及它们过去和未来的演变。过去的冰川变化可以通过直接测量和空间来估计，但是为了预测未来的冰川变化和相关影响，科学家们使用了冰川演变的数值模型。开放全球冰川模型（OGGM, http://oggm.org）是此类应用的主要模型之一。该模型是开源和模块化的（这意味着任何人都可以访问其代码并对其进行添加），因此已经被世界各地的几个研究小组使用。然而，它目前是由一小群科学家开发的，随着用户群的增长，模型开发面临着新的挑战。确保OGGM准备好应对未来的全球挑战至关重要。在这个项目中，我们寻求聘请一名训练有素的软件开发人员或一名具有较强软件工程技能的科学家与OGGM开发人员一起工作两年。我们计划通过添加创新的测试协议、移除和重构过时的代码，以及开发新的不确定性评估例程，来显著提高模型的健壮性。我们的目标是提高模型的能力，使其与来自更大科学界的替代和创新建模方法一起工作，以模拟冰川崩解或冰川动力学等过程。我们还将通过提供交互式在线教程和培训研讨会来鼓励新用户和开发人员采用该模型，并且，由于现代云技术，我们将为不太可能获得高性能计算资源的科学家提供特定的培训和资源。

Glaciers form prominent features of many landscapes, and their global shrinking has become an icon of climate change. Glaciers are a source of geohazards, are important regulators of water availability for downstream populations in many regions of the world, and are a major contributor to sea-level rise. With recent advances in Earth observation and numerical modelling, a new branch of glaciology (“global scale glaciology”) emerged to estimate the volume of all 200 000 glaciers of the world, as well as their past and future evolution. Past glacier change can be estimated from direct measurements and from space, but to generate projections of future glacier change and associated impacts, scientists use numerical models of glacier evolution. The Open Global Glacier Model (OGGM, http://oggm.org) is one of the leading models for such applications. The model is open-source and modular (meaning that anyone can access its code and make additions to it), and therefore is already used by several research groups worldwide. However, it is currently developed by a small group of scientists, and the model development faces new challenges as its user base is growing. It is crucial to ensure that OGGM is ready to be used to address future global challenges. With this project, we seek to hire a trained software developer or a scientist with strong software engineering skills to work in team with the OGGM developers for a period of two years. We plan to significantly increase the robustness of the model by adding innovative testing protocols, removing and refactoring outdated code, and by developing new uncertainty estimation routines. Our goal is increase the model’s capacity to work with alternative and innovative modeling approaches originating from the greater science community, to model processes such as glacier calving or glacier dynamics. We will also encourage new users and developers to adopt the model by offering interactive online tutorials and training workshops, and, thanks to modern cloud technologies, we will offer specific training and resources to scientists less likely to have access to high performance computing resources.