Global Warming - GCM Model-E
Additional work to make the model run

I have made a good start at getting GISS GCM Model-E to work on Windows XP. However, there are still issues (Yeh, it crashes ... and it is too slow).

At any rate, I can't afford the time to fix this by myself. Therefore, I am asking that anyone who wants to help - Please Do!


Crashes

The crashes should be addressed first. It is likely that these are because of differences in the compilers and not data problems. I specifically don't like the idea of - Just use another compiler - because there is no way to know which compiler is correct. I mean, what if the crashes represent a true design problem and that their compiler is the one with a problem.

It is more likely that certain math functions are handled by the hardware. (This is a common way to speed up a program ... because hardware math tends to be much faster than software math.) The problem is that some systems use different numbers of bits to represent numbers, and some systems simply have design problems. (Anyone remember the old Pentium math fiasco?)

The only way to know for sure is to track it down.


Speed

This model is extremely slow. (My opinion - not a reliable fact.)

It would be great to make this run a lot faster - maybe something like an hour per year instead of an hour per month.

I know which module is the problem ... but it calls a lot of subroutines, and they call subroutines, you get the idea.


User Interface

A nice Windows GUI (user interface) would be a nice touch.

I am not suggesting that the model should run in a window, but more that the output could be formatted to be useable.

For instance, a number of world maps are in the output files. These are hard to read because they are formatted using old line printer overstrike codes. Also, I haven't found a key explaining what all the numbers mean. This is one example.

This is what it looks like if the lineprinter + (overstrike) is shown as bold ... yeh, it is still hard to read (help!)

Notice - the displayed grid is 36 x 23, the simulation grid is 72 x 46


AViewer.exe

Actually, there is already a viewer of sorts for Windows XP ... but

To run this, download the exe file and quicktime dll's from AViewer - simple viewer for GISS Model E lat-lon output files

To get usable output, modify the INPUTZ section of the rundeck file to add QDIAG=.true.

Funny that this isn't in the user notes for AViewer - yet another solution I had to reverse engineer.


Author: Robert Clemenzi
URL: http:// questionable-science.com / Global_Warming / Model_E / FutureWork.html