Clear Climate Code: Rewriting Legacy Science Software for Clarity

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.