http://clearclimatecode.org/

They are doing a re-write into Python. While that is a worthy goal (and they have lots of good info about what they ran into), I have a slightly different goal. I want to have the original code running with minimal changes (and all of them clearly causing no change of function) so that any “issues” found are clearly not the fault of the “port” to another language.

Basically, I’m taking more of a “forensics” approach with minimal change to the “evidence” in the lab…

DaveE (15:32:33) : You do need a specific compiler to get that code to run unaltered.

I’ll see what I can find & let you know.

In the STEP4_5 parts is imports a file written in FORTRAN “unformatted” which is actually highly formatted… and dependent on your computer “endian” type. (are numbers stored with the most significant digit first or the least significant…) So you must either run the code on a “bigendian” box like a Sun SPARC (or most other large workstations, but not all) or if you run on an x86 type chip (I.E. on a PC or anything using a gaggle of them like some of the Intel Pentium thousands of processor “supercomputers”) you need a complier with a “convert=swap” flag in the file open command.

The newer (last time I looked, it was beta) release of the g95 compiler claims to support that feature.

Mary Hinge (06:31:39) : Like every other science there is never a straight correlation,

Where do you get this stuff? In MOST of science there very much is a straight correlation. Drop a rock, it falls. Drop it again, if falls. And with mathematically repeatable precision. Good enough that pendulum clocks were the standard for precision for centuries.

It is the odd and unusual cases that have non-intuitive correlations. And while there are enough of those to “keep it interesting”, to assert they are the dominate feature of science is bogus, to say “never a straight correlation” is just so wrong as to stop a reader in their tracks. Which I did. (No idea what else you said, it all became “uninteresting” at that point.)

Highlander (11:28:33) :
Tut Tut, such bad manners are uncalled for, I know you think ‘There can be only One’, I hope it isn’t you dear boy!
I cannot understand how some people can put forward such ill researched and totally incorrect statements and present them as fact, as some of the more gullible will accept it as such.
We know for certain that volcanism was responsible for the cooling of the 19th century, I have read on this blog about ‘The year without a summer’ , 1816, being ‘proof’ of the so called little ice age, totally ignoring the effects of Tambora in 1815.
Whilst it was cooler at times in the northern hemisphere it was warmer in the southern and during the so called medieval warm period it was cooler in the southern hemisphere at times it was warmer in the North. The detailed historic accounts of these times all take place where the North Atlantic has influence and can be explained by variations in ADO and also recent research also supports a Pan Atlantic Decadal Occilation, which would also affect South America and South Africa.
There you go, at least one other agency, as you put it. See what I mean about your innacurate statement?
What is not in any doubt is the fact that, whilst we are in a relatively prolonged solar minimum, temperatures are increasing, with lower atmospheric temperatures reaching ALL TIME HIGHS!!! If that doesn’t finally put to rest the now totally discredited theory by Svenmark then nothing will. It is there in front of your eyes, look at it and finally let it sink into your head that you are totally and uniquivicably wrong.
P.s. Do not use the word ‘Denier’ in your posts, it has been stated many times on this blog that this term is unacceptable due to historic connetations. I am happy to avoid using the term, please exhibit some degree of good manners by doing the same.

sky (15:10:56) :

Off course you don’t like the graph as it totally disproves what you have been trying to say! There has been no significant difference in trend in the last ten years despite all the sensationalist and innacurate claims on this site recently.
As I said lets wait and see what July’s figure brings shall we, Arctic ice melt is still accelerating and lowers amospheric temperatures are at the highest temperatures recorded http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps (curiously despite the unique nature of this ongoing event is still not given a dedicated post, perhaps this might be rectified).
I can understand you not looking forward to Julys figures, especially as this will further discredit the theory of low sunspots numbers and temperatures etc etc. (no decrease in temperature, no observable increase in cloud cover and no mechanism to support it).
In a nutshell, lets wait and see.

Scientific validity derives not from plausible scenarios, but from provable quantitative results. Had you any real appreciation of that difference, you would not say most of the things you do. And you certainly would distinguish between similarity of recent data trends and the effects of dissimilar “centering” of anomalies on different base periods. In fact, you would have spotted the red-herring figure of ~0.15C (the actual offset is closder to 0.33C) that I threw out to entice you, corrected that figure, and insisted on a sizable bet. Instead, you offer the all-too-comfortable prediction in the fourth week of July that the month will come in with high values in all indices. Sorry, but I’m not impressed by such scientific prowess.

In the context of the recent discussions of course it is valid that the high current lower atmospheric temperatures have followed on fron GISS high anomolous temperatures recorded last month. Like every other science there is never a straight correlation, for example in this particular example higher anomolous Arctic temperatures have resulted in very rapid ice melt (so far 2nd only to 2007) and the resulting release of ocean heat (it is no longer being insulated by the ice) has contributed to the high lower atmospheric temperatures.
The basic premise has been that GISS’s trend has been much higher than the satellite records recently, this is of course false as can be seen in the recent record from 1999 to 2008 (1999 chosen as after the El Nino of 1998 and 008 chosen as end point as last complete year).
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1999/to:2008/trend/plot/uah/from:1999/to:2008/trend/offset:0.275/plot/rss/from:1999/to:2008/trend/offset:0.24
I’m not a gambling kinda girl but I think you might be wrong about next months figures, satellite temperatures will show a very high anomoly. If the current rapid ice melt continues then both figures will be very interesting but lets wait and see!

Cut from the same mold also means similar experience. Since I started in computer’s with Fortran using punch cards, I appreciate the effort you’re putting in, and I’m eagerly anticipating the results, especially on TOBS.

BTW, while I don’t turn down any beer, Bud (though drinkable) isn’t my favorite… I’d rather folks raised a nice Pilsner or Gordon Biersch Marzen in honor of the milestone of “GIStemp running on a PC”. ;-)

The best beer I’ve had is ice cold and purchased by someone else, but I prefer wine. So the next time I’m in CA I’ll let you give me a tour of Napa Valley vineyards. ;~P

http://clearclimatecode.org/

If you get all five steps running, it would be interesting to add in the “missing” data. May take a little effort on my time to compile, but would be interesting.

Also might be interesting to run it just on rural stations, although the US would be a big blank post mid-2007.

I can think of lots of experiments :-)

You do need a specific compiler to get that code to run unaltered.

I’ll see what I can find & let you know.

DaveE.

America, there’s a man working behind the veiled secrecy of the internet, seeking truth where there is none. [...] Yes, it’s “Mr. cobbled together, ancient computer language code debugging guy”.

What a hoot!

Yup, that’s me, Intellectual Hip Waders pulled up to my armpits trudging through the muck… “Remember, that a journey through the ocean of most mens code will scarcely get your feet wet!”

Jim (07:29:51) :
Tim Clark (06:24:21) : So this is YOUR contribution? I would say E.M. Smith has you on the floor and handcuffed already. He actually has some interesting things to say, as opposed to your “humorous” piece.

Thanks for the compliment Jim! Tim’s humor was subtile enough that it took me about 1/2 way through to “wake up an smell the satire”.. And that is just the way I like it! (Mom was from England, so I have that love of humor just on the edge of ambiguous that Americans don’t seem to quite understand. Part of the goal is to have as much humor as possible while still being deliciously ambiguous to the very last minute…)

Tim Clark (09:20:28) : I think EM knows where I’m coming from, a tongue in cheek complement. We’re cut from the same mold, and he’s got a sense of humor.

Yup. I “got it”… Caped Crusader (bath towel safety pinned around neck) fighting the daemons of Linux from his Throne of Power (WiFi in “little room”) 8-)

BTW, I’ve now run all the code up through STEP3. That just leaves STEP4_5 to go. STEP4 seems to be an “update SBBX.HadR2″ process (finally found where to get SBBX.HadR2, working on finding the monthly update files) while STEP5 looks like it does the “add in sea anomaly map to land anomaly map”. I’m in the home stretch.

I’m now left with the conundrum of how to prove proper function of code who’s basic function I think is broken ;-0 but that’s for another day. For now, I’m assuming that if it compiled, it works as advertised. (The changes I made to make it go were fairly trivial and ought not to impact operation; and g95 looks like a fairly well done compiler.)

From a prior thread (about last April?) where comments are closed (and where I’d not realized there was a question asked of me…)

John Galt (08:03:10) :
@E.M. Smith:

We’re constantly told how complex the climate models are. Complexity is subjective, but how about lines of code? How big is the codebase? Does it really require a supercomputer to run?

GIStemp is a data aggregator, fabrication, and anomaly map making program. Don’t know if that counts as a “model”, but I think so. At minimum, it feeds into some of the other models.

I’ve put up answers to code detail questions at the link:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/gistemp/

The code base is about 7000 lines (once duplicates and hand tools are discounted). It’s not all that big.

Now, especially in the context of the “cobbled together ancient computer” comment, don’t snicker too much about what high performance platform I’m running it on. I wanted to be “period correct” (as all “re-enactors” will appreciate…) My Equipment:

An old box that started life as a 486 pc about 20 years ago, but had a motherboard upgrade about a decade+ ago. Presently running on a 400 Mhz AMD chip, with 64 Meg of SDDR memory (100 Mhz !) and 48 Meg of SIMM memory (of some slow speed… they made a transition board years ago that took both kinds of memory). With RedHat 7.x for the OS and an ancient 10 GB IDE hard disk. GIStemp has sucked up about 1 GB of it as it endlessly copies the original data, duplicating it a couple of times in each step. The code itself is very small…

FWIW, the only thing that has challenged the box so far was the make of gcc that I needed to do to get the 4.x libraries (I’m on 2.x in the box… I think). That was memory limited and swap showed that 256 Meg of memory would be overkill…

Running GIStemp is fairly quick (10 minutes?) for most stages. It’s mostly I/O limited, especially in the Python steps. So “any old PC” with a fast disk would be fine.

FWIW, the speed of the Mac laptop I use for a remote terminal is vastly better than this (recovered from the depths of the garage) dedicated development platform AND on a par with the speed of the Cray Supercomputer I managed 15 ish years ago. The ‘hot PCs” of today are pretty darned strong compute engines, at least after you get MS Windoze out of your way.

CO2 Realist (08:17:35) :
Frank K. (05:44:04) writes: E.M.Smith (03:02:13) :
Thanks for the link! Your analysis of GISTEMP is extraordinary and worthy of a post here at WUWT (perhaps in several installments). How about it, Anthony? :^)

So E.M.Smith, what do you say? I think it would be educational for many here.

I’m putting together a “GIStemp for the masses” summary. It’s not quite ready for prime time yet. I’ve just stated making the “data flow graph” of the hundred and one spotted files that GIStemp keeps creating. For now, I have mostly “techie” stuff along with specific critiques at the link above. When I have a decent (i.e Anthony Quality, rather than Me Quality) summary of GIStemp, I’ll give Anthony the right of first refusal on it.

For now, I’m just happy to have it compiled and basically runnable.

If anyone else wants to “make it go”, holler at me at the link above and I’ll put up the working version I’ve got. (Anyone have a public ftp site?…)

Basically, at this point, I’ve got a basically working, ported to Linux, version. Anyone wants it, I’m willing to share.

Over the next few weeks I intend to do basic function testing (my conundrum returns ;-) and then do a “modest rewrite” of some parts just to stamp out confusing and redundant bits where reasonable. Add some comments, maybe pull some “10 line scripts” into the parent that calls them. Clean up the constant trail of bread crumb files it leaves behind itself. That kind of thing. So you can have a copy now, or a better copy a bit later.

And at some point in that process, it will be “clean enough” to more easily say just what it really does. That’s when a simple, non-programmer, summary of it can be done… without loss of any more of my thinning hair…

BTW, while I don’t turn down any beer, Bud (though drinkable) isn’t my favorite… I’d rather folks raised a nice Pilsner or Gordon Biersch Marzen in honor of the milestone of “GIStemp running on a PC”. ;-)