ESMValTool v2.8.0 released!

[LisaBock]

Dear @ESMValGroup/esmvaltool-developmentteam,

ESMValTool v2.8.0 is released!

New versions of the ESMValTool (v2.8.0) and ESMValCore (v2.8.0) have just been released:

• https://github.com/ESMValGroup/ESMValTool/releases/tag/v2.8.0
• https://github.com/ESMValGroup/ESMValCore/releases/tag/v2.8.0

These versions are available, as usual, on GitHub, conda-forge, PyPI and as containers.

Please refer to the Changelogs for an overview of the latest changes and additions:

• https://docs.esmvaltool.org/en/latest/changelog.html#v2-8-0
• https://docs.esmvaltool.org/projects/esmvalcore/en/latest/changelog.html#v2-8-0

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Highlights:

ESMValCore:

• ESMValCore now supports wildcards in recipes and offers improved support for
  ancillary variables and dataset versioning.

  For details, see Automatically populating a recipe with all available datasets and Defining supplementary variables.

• Support for CORDEX datasets in a rotated pole coordinate system has been added.

• Native ICON output is now made UGRID-compliant
  on-the-fly to unlock the use of more sophisticated regridding algorithms.

• The Python API has been extended with the addition of three modules: esmvalcore.config, esmvalcore.dataset, and esmvalcore.local.

  For details, see our new example notebooks.

• The preprocessor multi_model_statistics()
  has been extended to support more use-cases.

ESMValTool:

• This release includes the diagnostics for reproducing four figures of Chapter 3 of the IPCC AR6 WG1 report
  (Link to documentation).

• A new set of recipes and diagnostics has been included to evaluate cloud
  climatologies from CMIP models as used in Lauer et al. (2023) (Link to documentation).

• Addition of a set of recipes for extreme events, regional and impact
  evaluation as used in Weigel et al. (2021) and in IPCC AR5
  (Link to documentation).

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Finally, a collection of output from 148 ESMValTool recipes run with version v2.8.0 is available on this portal: https://esmvaltool.dkrz.de/shared/esmvaltool/v2.8.0/

Happy model evaluation with ESMValTool!

Cheers,
Rémi and Lisa