Earth Digital is a reference project on the history of global climate models (GCMs) — the computer programs scientists use to simulate Earth’s climate system and project how it may change.
Modern climate models divide the planet into millions of three-dimensional grid cells and solve the fundamental laws of physics — conservation of energy, mass, and momentum, along with the equations of fluid dynamics and radiation — to calculate how temperature, pressure, humidity, wind, and greenhouse gases evolve over time. Running a century-long global simulation can take weeks on some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
This site walks through the milestones that got us here: the first single-atmosphere experiments of the 1950s and 60s, the coupled ocean–atmosphere and Earth System Models that followed, the coordinated international model intercomparison projects (CMIP), and the recent shift toward machine-learning weather and climate models. Each entry distills one paper into a short, structured summary with its original citation.
Learning from the past to better predict the future.