GMD Geoscientific Model Development GMD 1991-9603 Copernicus GmbH Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/gmd-2-1-2009 qtcm 0.1.2: a Python implementation of the Neelin-Zeng Quasi-Equilibrium Tropical Circulation Model Lin J. W.-B. 1 Physics Department, North Park University, 3225 W. Foster Ave., Chicago, Illinois 60625, USA 11 02 2009 2 1 1 11 This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This article is available from http://www.geosci-model-dev.net/2/1/2009/gmd-2-1-2009.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from http://www.geosci-model-dev.net/2/1/2009/gmd-2-1-2009.pdf

Historically, climate models have been developed incrementally and in compiled languages like Fortran. While the use of legacy compiled languages results in fast, time-tested code, the resulting model is limited in its modularity and cannot take advantage of functionality available with modern computer languages. Here we describe an effort at using the open-source, object-oriented language Python to create more flexible climate models: the package qtcm, a Python implementation of the intermediate-level Neelin-Zeng Quasi-Equilibrium Tropical Circulation model (QTCM1) of the atmosphere. The qtcm package retains the core numerics of QTCM1, written in Fortran to optimize model performance, but uses Python structures and utilities to wrap the QTCM1 Fortran routines and manage model execution. The resulting "mixed language" modeling package allows order and choice of subroutine execution to be altered at run time, and model analysis and visualization to be integrated in interactively with model execution at run time. This flexibility facilitates more complex scientific analysis using less complex code than would be possible using traditional languages alone, and provides tools to transform the traditional "formulate hypothesis → write and test code → run model → analyze results" sequence into a feedback loop that can be executed automatically by the computer.

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