Before jumping into development, please familiarize yourself with the MITgcm user manual . This document contains volumes of useful information and is included here by reference.
To develop for MITgcm project you will need a UNIX or UNIX-like set of build tools including the following:
CVS client, make or (preferably) GNU make, FORTRAN compiler, C compiler, [ba]sh and [t]csh shells, PERL, LaTeX and LaTeX2HTML
Essentially all of the work described here has been tested on recent versions of Red Hat Linux (eg. 7.3 through 9). Except where noted, all shell commands will be provided using bash syntax.