Tutorial 11 (Badlands) Results Differ Significantly from Expected Output

[lsli0116]

Description

I'm attempting to use Underworld for 2.5D modeling with Badlands and have encountered a discrepancy when reproducing Tutorial 11. The surface process results show substantially less sediment deposition compared to the tutorial's example output.

Expected Results

Based on the tutorial's provided output (from Dropbox link), we should observe clear sediment deposition patterns:

Actual Results

My reproduction shows minimal sediment deposition:

Steps to Reproduce

Follow Tutorial 11 procedures

Run the simulation with Badlands integration

Compare surface process output with provided tutorial results

Additional Notes

The issue persists when using the exact scripts from the tutorial Dropbox

The discrepancy suggests a potential issue in the SurfaceProcess module (UWGeo) or Badlands integration

Environment details: docker: underworldcode/underworld2:2.16.4-ompi

Questions

Has there been any changes to the SurfaceProcess module that might affect sediment deposition?

Are there specific parameter settings or dependencies that might explain this difference?

PS: Hi Julian @julesghub, Ben @bknight1 and Lu @NengLu, would you please to have a look?

[NengLu]

Hi Linsen @lsli0116 ,

The version of UWG used to run this model in Dropbox is UWG1.01, which is based on UW2.6 and PyBadlands. The coupling module in UWG with Badlands has not seen significant changes until UW2.17.x.

The main issue with this model is related to the sea level settings in Badlands. According to the input file from Dropbox, the sea level should be fixed at -200 m. However, as shown in the results files in Dropbox, the sea level changes over time and reaches approximately -5000 m at 5.0 Ma. It's unclear if these results were obtained using additional input sea level CSV files (see https://badlands.readthedocs.io/en/latest/xml.html#sea-level-structure) or due to some old features regarding sea-level settings in that version of Pybadlands.

We can achieve similar results to those in Dropbox by just setting the sea level position to -5000 m in "badlands.xml":

  <sea>
    <position>-5000.</position>
  </sea>

(Here, the env is Docker image: underworldcode/uwgeodynamics:v2.10.0, which should perform similarly to underworld2:2.16.4-ompi for this model)

Moreover, there have been some changes in UW2.17.x that may affect sedimentation. For more details, see the blog post New features of the surface-coupling framework in Underworld 2.