Climate Systems Center

The physics of climate of the Earth and other planets offers a wide variety of deeply intriguing and challenging problems.

The aim of the Center is to provide a congenial home for investigators thinking about such puzzles. We are interested in the full panopy of climate problems, from global warming to Neo-proterozoic glaciation to Martian paleoclimate. Most explorations are computer-assisted in one way or another, and there is a need for a climate system modeling framework which makes it easier to construct models for testing novel hypotheses about climate phenomena. The Center seeks to develop, incrementally, a climate modeling toolkit which can be knit together flexibly using the Python scripting language. The system will also simplify the implementation of models on modern parallel architectures, notably “beowulf” clusters built of commodity Linux boxes communicating on a fast network. Using climate simulation as a prime application, we also hope to advance the state of the art of scientific simulation software in general.