Generating new baseline files for a topic branch

When you begin work on a new topic branch, it is helpful to generate baselines to use in testing the correctness of your changes. It is recommended that you use the create_tests script to generate baselines from the origin of your topic branch so that you can check your results against these baselines without concern that they will be changed by concurrent integrations to the master branch.

To create baselines for your topic branch, you can invoke create_tests with the -g flag. To generate baselines for all tests in a test suite:

cd E3SM/cime/scripts
./create_test suite-name -g

(if you just want individual tests, 1 or more test names can be provided instead of suite-name)

Optional arguments:

--compiler: the name of the compiler for which baselines are generated (only needed if default compiler is not the one you want)
--test-root: the name of a directory in which the test case will be generated and run (only needed if default e3sm scratch area is not what you want)
--project: the name of the account to charge for compute time (only needed if default project for current machine is not the one you want)
--baseline-name: the name of your baselines (only needed if you want a name other than the current branch name)
--baseline-root: the root of your baselines (only needed if you want a different root than the machine default)

If your code development changes an answer in a test, you will need to regenerate your baselines for your tests to pass, both in testing your own topic branch, and when the branch is integrated to next (and then to master).