v4 preview release#291
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| See the full migration guide from Parcels v3 to v4 [here](https://docs.parcels-code.org/en/main/user_guide/v4-migration.html). | ||
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| Note that Parcels v4-preview is not a stable release yet, and we are still working on improving the performance of the framework and adding new features. We welcome feedback from the community, and encourage users to try out the new version and [report any issues or suggestions](https://github.com/Parcels-Code/parcels/issues). |
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TODO: Add link to new performance tutorial here
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| Note that Parcels v4-preview is not a stable release yet, and we are still working on improving the performance of the framework and adding new features. We welcome feedback from the community, and encourage users to try out the new version and [report any issues or suggestions](https://github.com/Parcels-Code/parcels/issues). | ||
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| Funded by the [WarmWorld ELPHE project](https://www.geomar.de/en/research/ongoing-projects/project-details/prj/376612?cHash=449a07d057ea0d890287bd2b8ca26e8b) funded by the German Federal Ministry for Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) and the [NWO Vici project “Tracing Marine Macroplastics by Unraveling the Ocean’s Multiscale Transport Processes”](https://www.nwo.nl/en/projects/vic222025), the development of Parcels v4 started in September 2025 and was a collaboration between the [GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel](https://www.geomar.de/en/), [FluidNumerics](https://www.fluidnumerics.com/) and the [University of Utrecht](https://www.uu.nl/en) in the Netherlands. The development was led by Nick Hodgskin, Joe Schoonover and Erik van Sebille, with contributions from many others, including Willi Rath, Daniel Lizarbe, and Michael Denes. |
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Anyone else we missed?
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Hi @VeckoTheGecko and @fluidnumericsJoe, I have drafted a blog post for the release of Parcels v4-preview. No real rush yet, but could you have a look whether you agree with this text, and where you think it can be further improved? |
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| title: 'Parcels v4.0-preview is available! 🚀' | |||
| date: '2026-08-01' | |||
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This is a placeholder for now; will need to adapt this to the actual release date
VeckoTheGecko
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VeckoTheGecko
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Thanks for putting this together @erikvansebille ! Here's some preliminary feedback - I'm happy to review again closer to release.
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We should refer to this version as v4.0 instead of v4-preview or v4.0-preview. We should also capitalise package names (Xarray, Python, Zarr, Dask etc.)
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I see the point about capitalising package names (and have done so in f78bef0), but I don't entirely understand why we shouldn't call it v4.0-preview. I actually like that name; it signals clearly to our users that this is not the stable version yet. If we simply call it v4.0, then users won't know it's unstable...
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Because I think its quite confusing:
v4.0-previewhints that there will be av4.0release later which will be stable, when that's not the case - there may be several "preview" releases until we get to the stablev4.xversion- users never actually install
v4.0-preview, they installv4.0. Conda nor PyPI support "preview" in the version name, "preview" is only shown when we talk about it - which I find unnecessarily confusing
I think it makes a lot more sense to say that it's v4.0 - which is treated as a preview release of Parcels to get early user feedback. I think mentioning this in the blog post, the tagged release, and on import (even as a banner in the docs we could do) is good and clearly communicated.
Perhaps there is something to be said about the paper. It would be cleaner to reference the stable version as v4.0.0, but that's just not an option if we go for this approach of doing preview releases that people get when they do conda install parcels.
Co-authored-by: Nick Hodgskin <36369090+VeckoTheGecko@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Nick Hodgskin <36369090+VeckoTheGecko@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Nick Hodgskin <36369090+VeckoTheGecko@users.noreply.github.com>
fluidnumericsJoe
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In general I think this looks good. Do we want to conclude with a "call to action" for users to engage with us through GitHub issues or in the Zulip CLAM community?
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This PR gets parcels-code.org ready for the release of Parcels v4-preview. Most importantly, it adds a blog post detailing the new v4-preview
Note that we will also need to make some changes to the docs-side; these are tracked in Parcels-code/Parcels#2702