CliMA: A New Open Source Code for Climate Modeling

Earth System Models (ESMs) are physical models that allow scientists to understand the progression of our planet’s climate on seasonal to decadal timescales, which is becoming increasingly relevant with the rapid progression of climate change. Many existing ESMs are developed based on legacy codes dating back to the 1970s, require hundreds to thousands of CPUs to run, and are not readily available to the public. The Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA) is developing an open source ESM from scratch with the intention of providing the wider community with access to a model that is less computationally intensive while still maintaining scientific accuracy. CliMA’s model will provide a framework within which scientists can easily iterate on existing science to test out novel theories. This talk will give an overview of the CliMA software ecosystem and demonstrate the benefits afforded to the scientific community by making such a project open source.