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HELP- MITgcm

can someone please explain what MITgcm is and how different people can use different models on it? I'm writing about subglacial melt rates and how it can be used to model them and everyone seems to have their own models however they all use MITgcm?

Reply 1

Plagioclase

Original post by enviroscistudent

MITgcm is a full ocean-atmosphere model that allows you to carry out physical experiments on the Earth's climate system. It's a single model, but because it's modular and extremely flexible, it can be used to investigate phenomena over a huge range of scales, from local or regional high-resolution models to fully global climate simulations. The model itself contains the equations that govern the behaviour of the oceans and atmosphere - these equations include (1) dynamical equations, which are the true fundamental equations that describe fluid behaviour e.g. Navier-Stokes, and (2) parameterisations, which are equations that describe the effects of complex phenomena (e.g. aerosols, clouds, eddies) that the model cannot explicitly resolve.

There are a lot of different GCMs available but there are two reasons why MITgcm is so popular. Firstly, it's open source so everybody can use it and modify it as they wish. Secondly, it's very flexible and can relatively easily be expanded to incorporate things like carbon cycling, biogeochemistry, etc.