Switch wisc meshes to z-star

[xylar]

Checklist

• User's Guide has been updated
• Developer's Guide has been updated
• Documentation has been built locally and changes look as expected
• Document (in a comment titled Testing in this PR) any testing that was used to verify the changes

[cbegeman]

Looks consistent with what we talked about. Would you like me to run some tests?

[xylar]

@cbegeman, that would be wonderful! If you can run the ECwISC30to60 mesh, init and performance tests, that would be a really great starting point.

[xylar]

If that goes well, we would also want to run dynamic_adjustment. That'll be a more rigorous test. Then, we'd probably turn on melting and run the simulation step for longer.

[xylar]

It could be that init fails. I can't recall if global_ocean in init mode is prepared for that coordinate. I hope so!

[cbegeman]

@xylar The model crashes (invalid state) at the second time step of ssh_adjustment when dt=30s

[xylar]

Thanks. Not promising, it sounds like. Presumably, waves are big enough to evacuate thin water columns.

[cbegeman]

@xylar I just reran the case with wetting and drying turned on and it doesn't appear that thin layers are actually evacuated. The config_verify_not_dry functionality should have caught that.

[xylar]

Thanks @cbegeman. I'll need to revisit this, then. I think I will prioritize other changes (like bathymetry, initial condition and vertical grid) first since they may affect this behavior.

[xylar]

I rebased this after various recent changes (e.g. to initial conditions and vertical coordinate) and it just worked! I was able to run mesh, init and performance_test on Chrysalis with the ECwISC30to60. I'm now running dynamic adjustment and will follow up with other meshes if all goes well.

[cbegeman]

@xylar That's great news!

[xylar]

It seems like some adjustments will be needed to dynamic adjustment (very meta) but no sense so far that it's an insurmountable problem.

[xylar]

I'm going to close this. I don't think we will be able to switch to the z-star vertical coordinate here on compass, and we should focus on doing that as part of the move to polaris this fall.