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NCAR Classic Libraries for Geophysics

Several mathematical libraries developed in the years 1970-1990 remain popular in the geophysics community. These libraries, listed below, are available for downloading here on GitHub: NCAR Classic Libraries for Geophysics.

Deformed 3D Sphere Scalar Harmonic Produced by a SPHEREPACK Subroutine

Image - Deformed 3D Sphere Scalar Harmonic Produced by a SPHEREPACK Subroutine

  • FFTPACK: A library of fast Fourier transforms

  • FISHPACK: Fortran subprograms for solving separable elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs)

  • FISHPACK 90: FISHPACK subprograms with a Fortran 90 interface

  • MUDPACK: Multigrid Fortran subprograms for solving separable and non-separable elliptic PDEs

  • SPHEREPACK: A Fortran library for modeling geophysical processes

All of these library routines are written primarily in Fortran 77. Their internal implementation does not always conform to the Fortran Standard. FISHPACK90 provides a Fortran 90 interface to the FISHPACK routines. Only MUDPACK is written with parallelism in mind; it uses OpenMP directives for shared-memory parallelism. The other libraries were designed to run on a single processor.

These libraries represent many person-years of development, and though they are no longer under development, NCAR continues to make them available to the public at no cost under a software licensing agreement. The libraries are best suited to Linux and UNIX environments and require a directory structure, tar, and gmake commands.

Modern Refactoring Efforts

Some libraries have been incorporated into more modern distributions thanks to open source contributions from the scientific community. This includes the below:

Feel free to open a pull request to these documentation pages if you would like any modernization efforts recognized here.