CISM / The Community Ice Sheet Model

Getting CISM

CISM is freely available and is hosted on GitHub.

The current release is 2.0.x.

There are two ways to obtain the code:

  • Archive files are provided for download in both zip and tar.gz formats. Each release has an associated archive file, and users should typically download the archive file for the most recent released version.
  • A complete Git repository may be cloned using either the HTTPS or SSH protocols. URLs for cloning the repository can be found on the right side of the repository homepage.

For those interested in contributing to the development of CISM, we recommend that you fork the repository on github. Information about forking repositories on GitHub is available on GitHub's website. Also see information below under "Developing CISM".

CISM and Glimmer

Note that code for the older Glimmer and Glimmer-CISM models can be found at the separate Glimmer-CISM organization on Github. CISM 2.0 retains most of the capabilities of the Glimmer model, and .config files used with Glimmer1.x should generally work with CISM2.x (with the caveat that users should check the new documentation since some option numbers have been re-ordered relative to older versions of the code). Note, however, that answers will change slightly between Glimmer1.x and CISM2.x due to reordering of some operations during each time step. Also, some of the drivers available in Glimmer (e.g., eis_glide) are no longer supported in CISM2.x. In CISM2.x the simple_glide and glint_example drivers have been combined into a single executable called cism_driver.

Installing and Running CISM

See the Documentation page to download the CISM documentation and learn about how to find additional help with building and running the code.

Developing CISM

CISM is open-source software, and community development is strongly encouraged. The User's Guide includes some background for interested developers. For more information: