MITgcm

MITgcm, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology general circulation model, is an open-source numerical model for simulating the three-dimensional ocean general circulation and sea-ice dynamics. It was developed at MIT for scientific research and education and is widely used in oceanography and climate studies.

The code solves the three-dimensional primitive equations for an incompressible fluid using a finite-volume discretization on staggered grids. It supports horizontal grids that can be Cartesian or curvilinear and vertical coordinates including z-levels, sigma coordinates, and isopycnal coordinates, providing flexibility to represent complex bathymetry and stratification. MITgcm can be run in free-surface or rigid-lid configurations and includes a sea-ice component, enabling coupled ocean-ice simulations, or can be coupled to external atmospheric models. The model is parallelized for high-performance computing using MPI (and supports OpenMP) and can be configured with various turbulence and mixing parameterizations, boundary conditions, and forcing terms.

It reads input and writes output in standard formats such as NetCDF, and it is accompanied by extensive documentation and tutorials. MITgcm is used worldwide for global and regional ocean circulation studies, climate research, ocean-ice interactions, and sensitivity/forecast experiments, as well as for data-assimilation and model-development work.