Sunday, February 04, 2007

The climate model "priesthood" gatekeepers

I registered, now lets see if they'll give me "access" to examine the source code for the models and modeling tools. Apparently 3 business days are required to get an approval or denial of access.

NOAA
Request software access

The following software packages are limited access. You may request access, but this does not guarantee approval. In order to request access, you must be register and be logged in.

Request access to MOM4
Request access to FMS Atmospheric Dynamical Cores
Request access to FMS AM2 Model
Request access to FRE: the FMS Runtime Environment
Request access to ESMF
Request access to Hallberg Isopycnal Model

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh! What an interesting idea! Wouldn't have occurred to me to ask for the sources. I'm not programmer enough to try it myself, but I've dealt with NOAA in the past and they seemed pretty straight.

I'll be interested to read how that turns out.

Purple Avenger said...

Modeling results are only as good as the tools and programming techniques used to produce them.

I'm not a climatologist. I am however a damn good computer geek who can tell if certain abuses of tool capabilities are happening.

Of course, tool misuse doesn't necessarily imply results are bogus, it raises the possibility. It is however an indication that there needs to be further investigation into the construction of the models and their results before we should be betting trillions of dollars on them.