Difference between revisions of "For IAM Modellers"

Latest revision as of 11:18, 17 June 2013

If you are a scientific modeller, for example involved in maintaining or building an Integrated Assessment Model (IAM), why not use MAGICC6 as your climate core? MAGICC is used by a number of leading IAM models, including the IMAGE Group at PBL Netherlands, the MESSAGE model at IIASA, the GCAM model by the Joint Climate Change Research Institute at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and University of Maryland, and multiple others. Another reason, why you might want to use MAGICC is because it was, for example, used to create the benchmark GHG concentrations in the creation process of the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs).

How to obtain your MAGICC version?

There are four options of how you can include MAGICC as your climate core:

• You can use the MAGICC/SCENGEN 5.3 software. This provides you with the additional benefit of having a scenario pattern generator bundled into it. The software package comes with a graphical user interface, but can be run as well as executable with ASCII configuration files.
• Similarly, you can download the Windows executable of MAGICC6, in case your modelling environment is running on Windows machines. This does not include a graphical user interface as version 5.3 (nor does it include SCENGEN), but you can set all of the model parameters via ASCII files ...
• As part of a collaboration & license agreement, you obtain the source code from us to integrate them in your Linux etc environment.
• And of course, you can use the web-interface live.magicc.org to run MAGICC6 on our servers. This provides you with the additional benefit of probabilistic runs over the whole 21st century. The online interface provides as well a great way for checking your results against our current MAGICC version.

Collaboration & License Agreements

In regard to the collaboration & license agreements, please contact Malte Meinshausen (malte.meinshausen@pik-potsdam.de). A short license agreement will have to be agreed upon and off you go, your IAM model can use a comprehensive range of gas cycles, climate feedbacks, and ESM or carbon cycle model calibrations in order to perform your experiments and sensitivity studies. All we ask for is a citation and that you share you experiences and development steps back to the central MAGICC development line. Of course, we, i.e. the developer team Tom Wigley, Sarah Raper and Malte Meinshausen, do not mind to be offered co-authorship on publications, if our continued time investments helped you to produce nice results. Please understand though, that unless it is a joint research or publication project, our limited time (i.e. 24h a day) will generally not permit us to provide additional support. The User FAQs and Forum should help you though to get up and running.