Add environment for ANTS and other ancillaries-related processing

[atteggiani]

Following some topics (example1, example2, example3), an environment for ANTS and pre- and post-processing support for ACCESS models is needed.

Opening this issue to start a discussion about:

• which dependencies should the environment include
• which Python version should the environment include
• name of the environment
• anything else??

@Whyborn @penguian

Please feel free to tag whoever you think should be involved in this discussion, thanks!

[Whyborn]

The ones I can think of are mule, ants and iris.

Name suggestion: ukmo-python

[atteggiani]

mule and iris are both dependencies of ants, so they will definitely be in the environment.

Name suggestion: ukmo-python

I would prefer not tying the name to UKMO, as the environment doesn't necessarily need to work only for ukmo-related files.

[Whyborn]

Is this environment also intended to be used for ancillaries for other model components? If that's the case, then it would effectively be the existing conda/analysis3 package?

[atteggiani]

Is this environment also intended to be used for ancillaries for other model components?

What do you mean by this?

This environment should definitely lighten the load on conda/analysis3 environment (that should not be needed within modelling suites) and could be used for model pre-processing (ancillaries too).
But what other model components ancillary tools are you talking about?

[Whyborn]

I didn't really have any in mind, only the UKMO related ones, hence the name suggestion. But your comment implied we're likely to have other packages included?

[atteggiani]

Oh alright.
Well potentially yes. In that case I wouldn't tie the name to a specific dependency (e.g. ants) or provenance (ukmo).

[atteggiani]

I was thinking somethin like access-model-processing (but I think it's too long).

[blimlim]

Following #42, it would be great to include umfile_utils which is has utilities for modifying um files. These are regularly used while setting up and running ACCESS models which contain the UM.

[atteggiani]

Based on what mentioned above, the proposed environment specs (STABLE and DEVELOPMENT) would be the following:

STABLE

name: <name>
channels:
  - accessnri
  - conda-forge
dependencies:
  - python
  - ants
  - ugants
  - umfile_utils
  - xarray

DEVELOPMENT

name: <name>
channels:
  - accessnri
  - conda-forge
dependencies:
  - python
  - ants
  - ugants
  - xarray
  - pip:
    - git+https://github.com/access-nri/umfile_utils.git@main

I don't think any UKMO package should be treated as a core development package.

Note mule and iris will be installed as they are both dependencies of ants.

What about the name? Any shorter version of access-model-processing?

[atteggiani]

Following a discussion within then Model Atmosphere Team, this environment name will be model-tools for the moment.

[blimlim]

@atteggiani, apologies I'd forgotten about this during the last meeting and just remembered. There's already a module named model-tools on vk83:

module use /g/data/vk83/modules
module avail model-tools
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /g/data/vk83/modules -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
model-tools/babeltrace2/2.1.2  model-tools/esmf/v8.7.0  model-tools/fre-nctools/2024.05  model-tools/fre-nctools/2024.05-1  model-tools/mppnccombine-fast/2025.07.000  

Could model-processing be an alternative?