Clear Climate Code: Rewriting Legacy Science Software for Clarity

Abstract

The Clear Climate Code project rewrote GISTEMP, a legacy software system used to produce an important global surface temperature dataset. The focus of the project is on clarity: making the source code as clear as possible to interested people, to improve public understanding. The result is a Python package that's easy to understand, run, and change, which allows any interested person to pose and answer novel research questions. In the process, the project's founders also discovered and fixed some inconsequential bugs and hopefully improved online discussion of global warming.