The Climate Code Foundation Software for Climate Science Nick Barnes talk at Google NYC, 2011-08-29...

The Climate Code Foundation

Software for Climate Science

Nick Barnes talk at Google NYC, 2011-08-29 climatecode.org

History

• 2000-2006: increasingly concerned about climate change, but unsure what I could do;

• 2007: NASA GISTEMP code released, widely criticised;• 2008: started open-source Clear Climate Code project,

rewriting GISTEMP in Python in our spare time;• 2010: founded Climate Code Foundation, a non-profit, to

continue this work and broaden it.• 2011: increasingly well-known by climate scientists:

publications, GSoC projects, invited to speak at workshops and conferences.


Goals

"to promote public understanding of climate science, • by increasing the visibility and clarity of the software used in

climate science, and by encouraging climate scientists to do the same;

• by encouraging good software development and management practices among climate scientists;

• by encouraging the publication of climate science software as open source."


Clear Climate Code

• Over-riding goal is clarity: code which interested members of the public can download, run, read and understand.

• Open-source, of course.• First target NASA GISTEMP:• ccc-gistemp.googlecode.com• 12 KLOC of Fortran (etc)• 3678 lines of Python• (including 1500 of docstrings)• fixed minor bugs. • fosters new science:• one paper in press, two draft.


Google Summer of Code 2011

• Improvements to ccc-gistemp, for public engagement (Filipe Fernandes, UMass Dartmouth).

• New homogenization code (Daniel Rothenberg, Princeton).• Visualising Holocene climate reconstructions using open

data (Hannah Aizenman, CUNY)


Three projects, all successful:

Scientists have never heard of GSoC, but when they do they think it's awesome. We hope to do more in 2012.

Science Code Manifesto


Code: All source code written specifically to process data for a published paper must be available to the reviewers and readers of the paper.Copyright: The copyright ownership and license of any released source code must be clearly stated.Citation: Researchers who use or adapt science source code in their research must credit the code's creators in resulting publications.Credit: Software contributions must be included in systems of scientific assessment, credit, and recognition.Curation: Source code must remain available, linked to related materials, for the useful lifetime of the publication.

Funding

• I say "non-profit". In reality, approximately, "Non-revenue".• All accounts open. • Total revenue to date £5181.26, from contract coding a

simple web-scraping academic project.• Total costs £1766.56, not counting this NYC trip.• Personal lost income to date well over $50,000. • Funding model seeking $200K+ annually from corporate or

NGO sponsorship (plus some project money from academic collaborations).

• Working hard on this.• Open to suggestions!


Google wishlist:Code: DOI minting, more reliable SCM servers, some sort of VM-based test framework?Charts: SVG, or some other path to publication-quality figures.Docs: working pagination.Scholar: sort results by date; author pages, institution pages. Do Microsoft Academic Search but better.Summer of Code: More scientific/academic participation. Fixing terrible web interface. Summer comes twice a year. Where is Google Science? Data repo? Data formats? Visualisations? Digitisation? Linking existing resources? Code?


Thank you:• Google, for GSoC, GoogleCode, and much more; • Richard Tucker, for hosting me in NYC;• Hurricane Irene, for sparing us all; • Everyone, for listening.


Questions?

The Climate Code Foundation Software for Climate Science Nick Barnes talk at Google NYC, 2011-08-29...

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