Documentation of MITgcm takes several forms:

The Manual

The manual, documenting the formulation, descretization and implementation, can be accessed by following the links on the left. These take you to the main sections of the document:
  1. Overview of MITgcm

    2. Discusses the continuous formulation of the model and illustrates some applications
  2. Discretization and Algorithm

    3. describes the spatial and temporal discretization of the model equations
  3. Getting started and using the MITgcm

    4. describes how to download, compile, run and modify the model.
  4. Software Architecture

    5. describes the software infrastructure for running on parallel systems.
  5. Automatic Differentiation

    6. describes how to generate the adjoint and tangent linear forms of the model.
  6. Physical Parameterizations and Packages

    7. describes the optional parameterizations and features available in the model.
  7. Diagnostics and other tools

    8. details of off-line tools used in conjuction with the model.
  8. Interface with ECCO

    9. describes the interface of MITgcm in the ECCO suite of optimization software tailored to large-scale ocean state-estimation
Jump to the full table of contents.

The manual is also downloadable in PostScript and PDF.
 

The hyper-linked browsable code

This allows you to peruse the source code by following hyper-links for variables, subroutines and functions. It allows you to find instances of variables, find where subroutines and functions are called from and inspect full model code.

In-source documentation

Comments in the source code itself have been formatted to render subroutine descriptions (written as prologues at the top of each routine). It is downloadable as: