v5.13.0 release notes

Clawpack 5.13.0 was released on August 23, 2025. See Installing Clawpack.

Permanent DOI: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16933803

Changes relative to Clawpack 5.12.0 (May 5, 2025) are shown below.

To see more recent changes that are in the the master branch but not yet released, see Changes to master since v5.13.1.

Changes that are not backward compatible

  • src/geoclaw_riemann_utils.f90 was modified to improve the convergence rate on a smooth problem. This does not seem to affect results in general, but may lead to slight differences in GeoClaw simulations since this affects the core Riemann solver used for shallow water equations.

  • Several bugs were also fixed in the Boussinesq (dispersive) version of GeoClaw, which may continue to evolve.

General changes

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

As part of this, the tests subdirectories of several repositories (classic, amrclaw, geoclaw) are being eliminated or reduced in scope, while many of the examples in the examples subdirectories now have new python scripts starting with test_ that typically run a smaller version of the example and then compare some output with values stored in a regression_data subdirectory.

The NumFocus Code of Conduct has been adopted by the Clawpack project and a file describing this has been added to the top directory of many of the repositories.

Changes to classic

  • Some examples modified to incorporate quick tests for conversion to pytest framework, with corresponding directorys in tests removed.

  • Minor changes to clean up old files.

See classic diffs

Changes to clawutil

  • switch from repr to str in data.py so that arrays are properly converted to list of numbers in .data files (rather than e.g., 0.3 showing up as np.float64(0.3), as produced by recent numpy versions.

See clawutil diffs

Changes to visclaw

  • Several minor changes.

See visclaw diffs

Changes to riemann

  • src/geoclaw_riemann_utils.f90 was modified to improve the convergence rate on a smooth problem. Does not seem to affect results in general, but may lead to slight differences in GeoClaw simulations since this affects the core Riemann solver used for shallow water equations.

  • sw_aug_1d_solver.f90 was added.

  • Several minor changes.

See riemann diffs

Changes to amrclaw

  • Fix ruled rectangle flagregions to be less sensitive to roundoff, so same refinement patches are more consistently computed with different compilers.

  • Fix definition of timing_line in valout.f90 that throws error with newer gfortran compilers (e.g. 15.1.0)

See amrclaw diffs

Changes to geoclaw

  • See changes to riemann/src/geoclaw_riemann_utils.f90 which affect the core Riemann solver for shallow water equations.

  • Some bugs were fixed in the boussinesq version of the code.

  • Fix definition of timing_line in valout.f90 that throws error with newer gfortran compilers (e.g. 15.1.0)

  • There is a new setrun.py parameter rundata.topo_data.override_order that is set to False by default to produce the default behavior in which cell-averaged topography values in GeoClaw are computed using the “best available” topofile at each point, assuming higher resolution (as defined by cell area dx*dy in the DEM) is better. If this parameter is set to True then instead the order the topofiles are specified in setrun.py is instead used (with best listed last). This is particulalry useful if two topofiles have essentially the same resolution but the cell areas differ slightly and it is important to be precise about which one has the better data. See Topography file ordering for more details.

  • General support added for reading and interpolating storms from NetCDF data, generalizing the previous support for OWI format storms, both the ASCII and NetCDF file formats. See PR #658 for more details.

  • A new function geoclaw.kmltools.dtopo_contours2kmz was added to plot contour lines of a dtopo deformation and wrap the plot in kml for viewing on Google Earth.

  • Deprecated np.infty replaced by np.inf several places.

  • geoclaw.dtopotools.create_dtopography was refactored so that the surface deformation dZ does not have to be first computed (and saved) for each subfault and then combined into the final dZ, which caused memory issues when dZ is on a fine grid and there are several thousand subfaults. Now each subfault dZ is discarded after use in accumulating the global dZ, greatly reducing the memory footprint.

  • Numerous other bug fixes and enhancements.

See geoclaw diffs

Changes to PyClaw

  • 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.