Another one bites the dust. Guess they don't teach FORTRAN in programming classes anymore.

Climate model code is so outdated, MIT starts from scratch

Julia replaces Fortran as the basis for Earth's new digital twin.

When faced with climate models coded in Fortran in the 1960s and 70s, MIT decided there wasn't any more cobbling together left for the ancient code, so they decided to toss it out and start fresh.

... CLiMA made the determination that old climate models, many of which were built 50 years ago and coded in Fortran, had to go if there was going to be any progress toward better climate models. Now that he's working at MIT on the CGC project, he's realized that "traditional climate models are in a language [MIT] students can't even read."

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When faced with climate models coded in Fortran in the 1960s and 70s, MIT decided there wasn't any more cobbling together left for the ancient code, so they decided to toss it out and start fresh.

I wonder what they have against the OpenIFS code? too European? It is probably my age but most of the programmers I know learned Fortran before going on to learn other things. I never did myself but the MIT people probably never learned ALGOL either.

Typical Register article. I'd be interested in hearing what a long list of respected climate scientists think of this article, and the claims in the proposal.

Typical Register article. I'd be interested in hearing what a long list of respected climate scientists think of this article, and the claims in the proposal.

Reading through it (which I hadn't done before my previous comment) there is at least one point of contention and that is that some of the current models using the Met Office code use 25 or 50Km squares rather than the 200Km resolution they refer to in the article though that was almost certainly true when I first came to CPDN.

I wonder what they have against the OpenIFS code? too European?.

If managing the liveware in bleeding-edge technologies has taught me anything ... "not invented here".

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Typical Register article. I'd be interested in hearing what a long list of respected climate scientists think of this article, and the claims in the proposal.

Reading through it (which I hadn't done before my previous comment) there is at least one point of contention and that is that some of the current models using the Met Office code use 25 or 50Km squares rather than the 200Km resolution they refer to in the article though that was almost certainly true when I first came to CPDN.

That was what I saw too. Many models around the world are using higher resolution than they stated. It will be interesting to see if anything in forecast improvement will come out of this effort. Perhaps so, but the claims, like in many research proposals, are likely exaggerated or overly optimistic.