The MITgcm (MIT General Circulation Model) is a numerical model designed for study of the atmosphere, ocean, and climate. Its non-hydrostatic formulation enables it to simulate fluid phenomena over a wide range of scales; its adjoint capability enables it to be applied to parameter and state estimation problems. By employing fluid isomorphisms, one hydrodynamical kernel can be used to simulate flow in both the atmosphere and ocean.

You are welcome to download and use MITgcm.

Papers charting the development of MITgcm can be found here.

story by Helen Hill

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Late Ordovician-early Silurian continental reconstruction interpolated on the MITgcm cubed sphere grid: AAC: Arctic Alaska-Chukotka, KO: Kolyma-Omolon, A: Avalonia, T: Tarim, NC: North China, SC: South China, An: Annamia. Ocean names are in italics - image courtesy A. Pohl

This month we spotlight new work by Alexandre Pohl and co-authors from France and the UK concerning ocean circulation in deep geological time. Pohl et al used a coupled ocean-atmosphere setup of the MITgcm to investigate the relationships between climate and marine biogeochemistry during the Late Ordovician (445 million years ago).

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story by Helen Hill

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Shelf ice edge in the Atka Bay, eastern Weddell Sea, off the coast of West Antarctica. Credit: Alfred Wegener Institute/Stefan Hendricks.

This month we spotlight work led by long time MITgcm associate Alberto C. Naveira Garabato. Using MITgcm, Garabato and his team constructed a suite of idealized modelling experiments to demonstrate that initial ascent of the meltwater outflow from an ice shelf cavity triggers a centrifugal overturning instability that grows by extracting kinetic energy from the lateral shear of the background oceanic flow, promoting vigorous lateral export, rapid dilution by turbulent mixing, and finally settling of meltwater at depth. Read the rest of this entry »

story by Helen Hill

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The Shetland shelf is one side of the Faroe-Shetland Channel: a deep bathymetric channel extending north-eastwards between Scotland and the Faroe Islands - Image: Wikipedia

This month we spotlight work by Arjav Trivedi and Ralf Toumi in the Space and Atmospheric Physics Group, in the Physics Dept. at Imperial College, London, UK, who have been using MITgcm to study the circulation on the Shetland Shelf system. Read the rest of this entry »

To round out the year we have again collected a sample of over one hundred research articles published in 2016 that involved MITgcm in some way. Email missing citations or pitch your research to [email protected]. Happy New Year!

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