January 15, 2008 :

Breaking News: Hidden up-to-date Documentation escaped from hide-out:
Latest Online Documentation

March 19, 2007 :

Breaking News: The MITgcm is now able to generate Sea-Ice Donuts. In a push to move forward MITgcm on the path of fundamental science and climate understanding, David Ferreira and Jean-Michel Campin simulated a Sea-ice Donut using a coupled AquaPlanet configuration (see movie here). This experiment was initialized with the T and S fields from a previous Aquaplanet run which has polar sea-ice caps. These caps are associated with salt-compensated temperature inversions in the upper ocean. The new run is initialized without sea-ice and within a month, large sea-ice caps grow over the poles, rejecting salt. This triggers convection which in turns brings relatively warm water to the surface and melts the ice close to the poles. Here we have a donut. Look out for that chapter on aqua-planets in the next IPCC report!

Feb 04, 2007 :

News is back by popular request. New advection schemes are currently being tested. Some preliminary results from the new schemes can be seen here. The plots show a tracer being transported and stretched in the MITgcm advect_xz verification test. Both new schemes (OS7MP and Prather second-order scheme with limiting) have very low implied diffusivity. We are currently evaluating the schemes to assess their implied diffusivity, with a bottle of Jean-Michel's favorite Belgian beer going to the the least diffusive scheme - watch this space!

March 9, 2005 :

A short article entitled "NASA Supercomputer Improves Prospects for Ocean Climate Research" in the current EOS (volume 86, number 9, March 1 2005) gives a succinct overview of some of the advanced high-resolution state-estimation work being undertaken with MITgcm by members of the ECCO consortium. The article describes ground-breaking computational technologies that have enabled this work and outlines the future goals of this next generation planetary scale assimilation initiative. A pdf containing the article can be found here.

Sep 24, 2004 :

MITgcm is now able to write and (to a lesser extent) read NetCDF files. The framework (the "MNC" package) has been tested by numerous developers on literally dozens of machines and, for the past month, has been a working part of our standard verification suite. We encourage MITgcm users (especially new users) to try out the MNC package since the model output is now much easier to read and understand. For further NetCDF information please see:

• Manual entry for the MNC package.
• Directions from our email archives and from our wiki for installing NetCDF.
• The main NetCDF web site.

May 20, 2004 at 05:01 EDT :

Congratulations to Ed and Boo on the birth this morning of a 7lb 1oz, baby girl, Alexandra Sophia.

April 13, 2004 :

A new movie by Dimitris Menemenlis and Chris Henze shows ice dynamics over the North Pole. The viscous-plastic behavior of ice sheets subject to wind forcing and ocean currents can be clearly seen in the translucent ice-sheet. The movie can be downloaded from here (this one is 91MB!). A set of web pages with summary information regarding MITgcm simulations being carried out in the ECCO high resolution global ocean state estimation initiative can be found here.

March 26, 2004 at 01:38 EST :

Congratulations to Alistair and Sonya on the birth this morning of a 7lb 3oz, 19.5 inches long baby girl, Ariane Jade.

January 22, 2004 :

A spectacular movie by Chris Henze of NASA AMES beautifully captures an eddy permitting expanded cube sphere MITgcm simulation being carried out, as part of the ECCO project, by Dimitris Menemenlis and others at JPL with help from core MITgcm team members and staff from NASA AMES. The animation shows the speed of ocean currents at 15m depth from the simulation, it can be downloaded here (its 47MB but worth waiting for!). A second animation with different perspectives and rotation can be downloaded here. As described here Dimitris Menemenlis will be presenting aspects of this calculation at AGU in Portland. A list of some other AGU 2004 presentation abstracts related to MITgcm can be found here.

December 9th 2003 :

The new continuous testing page at provides information on the status of the latest development code. The page shows summary pass-fail ratios for the MITgcm regression tests on various platforms. Details on the platforms being tested and detailed information on the status of individual regression tests can be viewed from links on the test page.

October 27th 2003 :

MIT Climate Modeling Initiative (CMI) web pages introduce the MITgcm model, its applications, and the development team.

October 21st 2003 :

MITgcm and ECCO-JPL team feature as showcase application in NASA-SGI large shared memory system program.