v5.12.0 release notes

Clawpack 5.12.0 was released on May 5, 2025. See Installing Clawpack.

Permanent DOI: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15350682

Changes relative to Clawpack 5.11.0 (August 25, 2024) are shown below.

To see more recent changes that are in the the master branch but not yet released, see Changes to master since v5.12.0.

Changes that are not backward compatible

  • In GeoClaw, several bugs were fixed in the implicit solvers for Boussinesq equations. A newer version of PETSc (>= 3.20) is now required and names of some variables in the petscMPIoptions file have changed, along with some of the environment variables expected in the Makefile.

General changes

Unit testing and continuous integration on Github continue to be broken, but we are working on modifying tests to use pytests (rather than nose) and Github CI (rather than travis).

Changes to classic

  • None

See classic diffs

Changes to clawutil

  • A make check option has been added to the general Makefile.common, which prints out the values of environment variables used in the Makefile.

See clawutil diffs

Changes to visclaw

  • Several minor changes.

See visclaw diffs

Changes to riemann

  • Several minor changes.

See riemann diffs

Changes to amrclaw

  • Fix gauges so value at initial gauge reporting time t1 is alway output at start of gauge output file. Previously if min_time_increment > 0 was set for a gauge it wouldn’t capture the gauge value until this long after the starting time value t1 specified for the gauge.

  • Allow an arbitrary number of flagregions (was limited to 99 previously).

See amrclaw diffs

Changes to geoclaw

  • Some new capabilities added for storms.

    Support for reading in data files that specify wind and pressure fields on a grid is now supported. This currently specifically reads files in the Oceanweather Inc. formats NWS12 (ASCII) and NWS13 (NetCDF) with further support for more general NetCDF data included. This should be considered experimental at this time but is included to test this functionality out and start to plan out support for more file formats and nested grids.

  • A new speed_limit was introduced that can be set in setrun.py, e.g.

    rundata.geo_data.speed_limit = 20.  # meters/sec

    This is used to reduce the fluid speed each time step in any cell where the speed exceeds this value. The default value is 50, which is larger than physically reasonable speeds for almost all problems. This fix seems to often eliminate problems where the code dies with Too many dt reductions. See https://www.clawpack.org/dev/speed_limit.html for details and more discussion.

  • Several bugs were fixed in the 2D Boussinesq solver implementation described at https://www.clawpack.org/bouss2d.html, mostly concerning the way boundary conditions at patch edges are handled in the linear system solver when there are re-entrant corners on a fine level (e.g. the inside corner of an L-shaped union of patches). Domain boundaries were not always handled properly in the case of solid wall or periodic boundary conditions.

  • For efficiency, the sparse matrix needed for the dispersive terms is now built directly in CSR (compressed sparse row) format, as used by the PETSc linear solvers, instead of building the matrix in COO (coordinate, or triplet format) and then converting. This should not affect users’ code (except to make it run faster).

  • The 2D Boussinesq code should now be run with PETSc 23.0 (or later), which requires some changes to parameter names in the petscMPIoptions file and environment variables used in a Boussinesq application Makefile. See https://www.clawpack.org/bouss2d.html, and $CLAW/geoclaw/examples/bouss/README.txt for more information.

  • The calling sequence of cellgridintegrate was changed to remove topo_module variables.

  • Numerous other bug fixes and enhancements.

See geoclaw diffs

Changes to PyClaw

  • Some changes related to CI and pytests, still in progress.

  • Several other minor changes.

See pyclaw diffs

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.