Use MET/METplus modules on NOAA Cloud

[EdwardSnyder-NOAA]

Description

PR 826 changes how the MET and METplus variables are used by calling them via modules instead of variables listed in the machine and config files. These changes have not been adopted by the NOAA Cloud platform yet. This feature request is to track the progress of the MET and METplus modules on the NOAA Cloud platform.

Currently, any MET VX test (ex: grid_RRFS_CONUS_25km_ics_NAM_lbcs_NAM_suite_GFS_v16) fails while running the MET VX tasks. See code snippet below:

202105121200    run_MET_Pb2nc_obs                                  171                DEAD                 256         2           8.0
202105121200    run_MET_PcpCombine_obs_APCP01h        172                DEAD                 256         2           9.0
202105121200    run_MET_PcpCombine_obs_APCP03h        173                DEAD                 256         2           9.0
202105121200    run_MET_PcpCombine_obs_APCP06h        174                DEAD                 256         2           9.0

Solution

Thankfully the new spack-stack does build the met and metplus packages. We would need to update MET and METplus lua files. On GCP this process has started and can be found here:

/contrib/EPIC/spack-stack/spack-stack-1.4.1/envs/unified-dev/install/modulefiles/intel-oneapi-mpi/2021.3.0/intel/2021.3.0/metplus/4.1.1.lua

/contrib/EPIC/spack-stack/spack-stack-1.4.1/envs/unified-dev/install/modulefiles/intel-oneapi-mpi/2021.3.0/intel/2021.3.0/met/10.1.1.lua

The test mentioned above now passed on GCP. We will need to make the following changes:

• Add DOMAIN_PREGEN_BASEDIR to the noaacloud machine file
• Update modulefiles/tasks/noaacloud/run_vx.local.lua

See /contrib/Edward.Snyder/spack-1.4.1-test/git-repo/ufs-srweather-app for changes made on GCP.

Requirements**

Use the latest installed spack-stack version 1.4.1. Add logic to automatically add the MET and METplus variables to the lua files for every new spack-stack install of MET and METplus.

Acceptance Criteria (Definition of Done)

To be able to run the MET VX tests on NOAA Cloud - passing on all three cloud service providers.

[EdwardSnyder-NOAA]

The lua files are built via spack-stack. An issue was made with the spack-stack team to add these missing variables.
Here is an example from Hera of the variables we would need to add:

met:
setenv("MET_INSTALL_DIR", "/scratch1/NCEPDEV/nems/role.epic/spack-stack/spack-stack-1.4.1/envs/unified-env/install/intel/2021.5.0/met-10.1.1-up2zvu3")
setenv("MET_BASE", "/scratch1/NCEPDEV/nems/role.epic/spack-stack/spack-stack-1.4.1/envs/unified-env/install/intel/2021.5.0/met-10.1.1-up2zvu3/share/met")
metpplus:
setenv("METPLUS_PATH", "/scratch1/NCEPDEV/nems/role.epic/spack-stack/spack-stack-1.4.1/envs/unified-env/install/intel/2021.5.0/metplus-4.1.1-aa26ydm")

[EdwardSnyder-NOAA]

From the issue discussion, a better way to do this was suggested, which should be included in PR-913.