Why a GCM?
There has been much interest in "citizen science" of late in the climate change blogosphere. There have been many global temperature reconstructions over the past several months. I think efforts like this are extremely valuable and that more should be done, especially in order to improve our understanding of (or increase our confidence in) an important issue such as climate change.
In this light, I want to start a project in order to create an open source GCM. This blog will have a series of posts that discuss various aspects of GCM's and how to implement it in GoGCM. I think GCM's are often misunderstood and these posts (while trying to design this GCM) will shed some light on how GCM's work, and what they can/can't do.
While the main audience of this blog will be "citizen scientists" (eg. Engineers, Programmers and other technical persons interested in Climate Change), I am hoping that some of the Climate Experts will contribute in some form (commenting or guest posts) from time to time.
Why Go?
Since it was released in November 2009, I have been following the development of the Go Programming Language. My first reaction was, if you take a few interesting languages and strip the interesting parts out, you get Go. Since then, I've been looking more and more at this language, and I have been extremely impressed. While the feature set seems basic on first inspection, it is quite expressive. Andrew Gerrand had two posts (part 1 and part 2) that demonstrates this nicely.
I think the Go Programming Language represents an important innovation in programming. In particular, it's ability to reduce bookkeeping and focus on the important parts of code are remarkable. While many in the "citizen science" climate community have been relying on R for the analysis of the temperature reconstructions, I believe a project like this requires something more substantial.
The other option would be using directly the source code provided by current GCM's (GISS and NCAR for example). While this option likely has a better chance of success (a GCM that actually runs), developing GoGCM will force all aspects of the GCM to be investigated. This means that the GCM's will be understood more by the community that I hope this blog fosters.
The final reason I chose Go, is that I am optimistic about the Go Programming Language. I believe it could be an important general programming language in the future. By trying to create GoGCM (especially with a vocal "citizen science" community), I'm hoping to attract dozens of new Go programmers, particularly those who are interested in scientific programming like I am.
Going Forward
I'll be laying out some of basics rules for how this site will work and try to start some technical threads for the basic design decisions. As well, I'll be setting up project page (likely github) in which I will post the code. I look forward to any feedback.
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