By Deepak Jeswani Dewan, Rogardt Heldal, Sofia Thorsson, and Fredrik Lindberg, Chalmers University of Technology and University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
The aim of this work is to build an architecture around “SOLWEIG – a climate model made in MATLAB” [1,3], which makes it extensible and user-friendly. This is a joint project between the Software Engineering Group at Chalmers University of Technology and Urban Climate Group at University of Gothenburg. SOLWEIG is a radiation model that can make climate estimations (such as sunshine durations, shadow patterns and daily shading) and analyse the complex interaction between urban design and the thermal environment. It was developed by the Urban Climate Group, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Software Research and Climate Change 
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April 22, 2010 at 2:36 pm
Ian Sommerville
I know nothing about this system and so have no idea how effective it is. But it does not seem to me that adding a user-friendly interface is a research challenge. In what way is it different from regular user-interface engineering?
I honestly can’t see this paper as a stimulus for discussion at the workshop.
April 23, 2010 at 2:18 pm
Jorge
I, too, know nothing about SOLWEIG other than what the paper and some of its references state (I found this link helpful: http://www.gvc2.gu.se/ngeo/urban/SOLWEIG/SOLWEIG_11/SOLWEIG_HELP_v11.pdf). From what I can gather, SOLWEIG helps urban designers examine whether some urban settings will feel uncomfortably hot at certain times of the day, with the purpose of designing urban areas to maximize comfort. As such, this system is not really about fighting climate change.
However, the authors explain that the challenge they faced was to make their software usable by people other than the group that developed it. This is a real problem for many scientific software systems. The authors seem to have some important insights to share regarding how to help people go through the difficulties of installing and using a complex system, by reducing those difficulties as much as possible. In this sense I would really like to spend some time chatting with them to figure out how can we replicate their efforts with climate models, and where do they think the main challenges for wider acceptance lie. A workshop discussion around this topic would be useful, even though the system the paper discusses is rather off-topic.
April 26, 2010 at 1:35 pm
Ioannis Athanasiadis
Building good quality environmental software is a challenge that is difficult to get credit for. Environmental modelling community sees no contribution to new implementations (as there are no new models), and the software community sees just a development effort in a different application area. And, this is no way to breakthrough.
However, environmental software does not encompass great research challenges per se, and I have the impression that this is the case with SOLWEIG. As presented, I do not see major challenges that the authors faced. Seems that they wrote a neat, usable interface for a stringent piece of software. I strongly suspect that the process made them more intelligible than the product itself, and I would like to see in the workshop their reflection on the process. How is it to put together computer scientists of the Software Engineering Group at Chalmers University of Technology with the climatologists of the Urban Climate Group at University of Gothenburg? What would make this process different than the “business as usual” case of developing software (i.e for a business application?)
May 2, 2010 at 10:40 am
tagae
My first impression is that this paper is off-topic for the workshop. On a second thought, I could imagine a discussion revolving around how to render systems such as SOLWEIG (which help us to better understand urban climate) more accessible and easier to use by the targeted scientific community. The issue of improving software usability is general to any kind of system, and hence not specific to the workshop, but it could be that during a discussion some points arise regarding software and climate change.