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Over 15 years ago, Slashdot ran a story about EdGCM, an educational climate modeling tool, being released freely to the public. The actual model, as in the numerical climate simulation, was GISS Model II, and it was developed at NASA in the early 1980s. The actual model was released by NASA as open source, but was being maintained at Columbia University. By the time of the story, NASA had developed newer models such as GISS ModelE that were more advanced, could simulate climate processes with greater detail, and could use the capabilities of modern computer hardware to improve processing speed.

The EdGCM tool was effectively a front end to the underlying model, providing a fairly intuitive interface for configuring simulations, starting and stopping the model, and visualizing output. EdGCM was bundled with a variety of data sets that allowed simulations of present and near future climate scenarios, and also some paleoclimate scenarios. Climate models might as well be a black box for many people. People hear about the models and their projections of future climate, but I don't think that climatologists have adequately educated people on what the models are and how they work. If people are going to vote on policy decisions that are influenced by projections of future climate, we need the public to be scientifically literate about climate and how climate projections are made. EdGCM is a great educational tool to give students hands-on experience in the classroom working with a basic climate model.

A few years after the initial release, EdGCM was moved behind a paywall, requiring users to purchase licenses to obtain the software. For students, the price was $29. For everyone else, the price was set at $199. A few years ago, the EdGCM website effectively went dark, promising a new website that has never been brought online. At this point, it seems the project is effectively dead.

Although Model II is open source, the interface built atop it is not. Directly running Model II is non-trivial. The model settings are input via a namelist that must be configured, something that EdGCM did. The output must be postprocessed into a format that is usable with analysis and visualization tools. The model is a three-dimensional simulation of the Earth's climate, but it requires an initial condition from which to begin the simulation. The initial conditions includes the state of the atmosphere, land surface, oceans, and ice cover that comprise the climate system.

The initial conditions for the present day will not suffice for simulating the last glacial maximum, the climate during the Permian-Triassic extinction, the snowball Earth, or any other interesting paleoclimate scenarios. A few such data sets were bundled with EdGCM, but they have to be generated for any particular scenario. This is not simple, particularly for paleoclimate simulations where we have no direct observations of the climate. Although I am not absolutely certain, I believe the data sets bundled with EdGCM with likely proprietary and could not be redistributed without permission.

Old Windows and Mac versions of EdGCM are available on archive.org and can be downloaded from where. The Mac version that is archived was built for PowerPC and cannot run on anything resembling a current Mac system. The Windows version was designed for 2000, XP, and Vista. It can run on Windows 10 but is very clunky, and some features do not work correctly or at all. In their present form, the versions that can be freely downloaded are not suitable for use in the classroom.

Unfortunately, independently recreating the work that went into EdGCM is a very difficult process. Building the software interface around the model is actually the easy part. The file formats for the initial conditions are documented online, but the detail isn't enough to fully understand how those files are structured. For example, "the wacky part is that topographic height is scaled by gravity" is a bit confusing. I assume it means that the topography is the elevation in meters multiplied by 9.81 m/s^2, meaning that it's the geopotential height of the land surface. But that's not totally clear, and the units aren't actually given. All of the files on that page have to be created in order to run the model, which seems to be a much larger challenge than creating the EdGCM interface.

Suffice it to say, the apparent discontinuation of EdGCM is a great loss to science and education. There don't appear to be comparable tools available that provide similar levels of functionality and could reasonably be used in high school and college science classes. Believe me, I've spent plenty of time searching. One goal of this journal is to raise awareness of the need for tools like this. But it also raises a problem with many projects in academia. When the funding goes away, the project tends to be abandoned. Those funds often come from grants where money is scarce, the paperwork is onerous, and a lot of very beneficial projects never get funded. If the source code and data aren't freely available, works like EdGCM might as well be totally lost. I don't have the answers except to say that I strongly oppose proprietary licenses for works like these, and that the funding model is seriously broken.