[FEATURE REQUEST] Clean up start/end time usages in benchmark scripts

[lizziel]

Name and Institution (Required)

Name: Lizzie Lundgren
Institution: Harvard University

New GCPy feature or discussion

This is a non-urgent nice-to-have feature request. I noticed that the start/end benchmark dates passed to the benchmark run scripts are based on GC-Classic ref. This means the GCC ref start/end time in the benchmark config files need to be updated even if GC-Classic data is not being used, e.g. GCHP vs GCHP comparison only. This does not impact the normal GEOS-Chem benchmarks since we always set GCC ref for those and use the same years for GCC and GCHP. However, it does impact use of GCPy for comparing GCHP runs. In that case if the GCC entries are not updated and the GCHP data is for a different year, then GCPy will error out.

I have two ideas for fixing this:

1. Ideally we would only pass config to the benchmark run scripts, and not config, start, and end as we do now. The start/end information is in config and so should not need to be passed separately. The GCC_vs_GCC, GCHP_vs_GCC, etc entries in config can be used to determine which start/end dates to use.
2. There is some logic within run_benchmark (before the 1-yr scripts are called) that checks that the GCC ref start/end date spans one year. We could specify if the benchmark is one year within the config file to avoid having to determine which start/end entry to use (GCC or GCHP, ref or dev).

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