v5.9.0 release notes

Clawpack 5.9.0 was released on August 26, 2022. See Installing Clawpack.

Permanent DOI: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7026045

Changes relative to Clawpack 5.8.2 (December 14, 2021) are shown below.

To see more recent changes that are in the the master branch but not yet released, see Changes to master since v5.10.0.

Follow the links to see changes that have been made to the master branch of each repository since the last release (v5.9.0) on August 26, 2022.

These changes should appear in the next release. If you need them now, see Developers’ Guide for instructions on cloning and installing from the master branch.

To see documentation that has already been developed to accompany any new features listed below, click on the “dev” branch of the documentation, in the menu on the left hand side of this page.

Changes that are not backward compatible

General changes

  • ‘binary32’ added as an output_format option in both amrclaw and geoclaw. (So far classic only supports ‘ascii’ output.) The old ‘binary’ option now defaults to ‘binary64’, which dumps the raw binary of the full float64 (kind=8) Fortran variables. The new ‘binary32’ option trucates to float32 (kind=4) before dumping, and results in binary output files that are only half as large. Since float32 values have about 8 significant figures, this is generally sufficient for most plotting and post-processing needs. These files are also much smaller than the files created with the ‘ascii’ option, which is generally recommended only for debugging if you need to examine the output files directly. For more info, see http://www.clawpack.org/output_styles.html

  • Gauge output in amrclaw and geoclaw can also now be specified as ‘ascii’, ‘binary64’, or ‘binary32’, see http://www.clawpack.org/gauges.html for instructions.

  • Adding support for ‘binary32’ required changes in the pyclaw, clawutil and visclaw repositories as well.

  • A new fgout capability was added to geoclaw (see below and Fixed grid output (fgout)), which also required additional changes to other repositories.

Changes to classic

  • Comments in some sample setrun.py files were changed to make it clear that only output_format = ‘ascii’ is supported so far in classic.

See classic diffs

Changes to clawutil

  • Support for ‘binary32’ and fgout grids added.

See clawutil diffs

Changes to visclaw

  • Support for ‘binary32’ and fgout grids added.

  • pcolor plots are now rasterized by default, which greatly reduces the file size in some cases. When e.g. savefig(‘filename.svg’) is used the labels are still vector graphics but the flow field is rasterized. Passing the option pcolor_kwargs = {“rasterized”:False} in setplot turns this off. See <https://github.com/clawpack/visclaw/pull/286>.

  • The JSAnimation subdirectory was removed, since we now use anim.to_jshtml instead.

See visclaw diffs

Changes to riemann

  • None.

See riemann diffs

Changes to amrclaw

  • Support for output_format=’binary32’ added for both output frames and gauges.

See amrclaw diffs

Changes to geoclaw

  • Support for output_format=’binary32’ added for both output frames and gauges.

  • New fgout grid capabilities added, as described at Fixed grid output (fgout). This allows specifying one or more fixed resolution rectangular grids on which the AMR solution will be interpolated (in both space and time) at each time in a specified set of times. This does not affect the time steps used in the computation and allows frequent output on a fixed portion of the domain for making animations or doing post-processing, such as particle tracking based on the velocity field.

  • The new fgout capability (together with Fixed grid monitoring (fgmax)) replaces the very old fixedgrid capability, which has now been further deprecated.

  • $CLAW/geoclaw/examples/tsunami/chile2010_fgmax has been replaced by $CLAW/geoclaw/examples/tsunami/chile2010_fgmax-fgout. This example now also shows how to plot results on fgout grids either by using a special setplot function or by reading them directly. It also shows how to make an animation from the fgout results.

See geoclaw diffs

Changes to PyClaw

  • Support for reading fgout frames added, by passing the parameter file_prefix more consistently (which can be e.g. fgout rather than fort, as used for output frames).

  • Support for reading binary output files with format ‘binary32’ or ‘binary64’. Added for both output frames and gauges. The old ‘binary’ format is equivalent to ‘binary64’.

  • Support reading file_format from the fort.t files, now one of ascii, binary32, or binary64. See General Changes above for more details.

See pyclaw diffs

For older changes in PyClaw, see also the PyClaw changelog.

Other Clawpack Repositories

The repositories below are not included in the Clawpack tarfile or pip install, but changes to these repositories may also be of interest.