The OpenEarth philosophy on models involves the storage, maintainance and dissemination of model schematisations and the scripts to develop these at a central location.

Especially for locations and/or where models are regularly used in practice it is often seen that model schematisations and especially the lessons learned developing them are not easily transferred over the boundaries of projects. By scripting the model setup process as much as possible and putting the model setup scripts and the resulting model schematisations under version control the opportunities to achieve efficiency effects by profiting/learning from past experiences increases. Note that OpenEarth considers only the model schematisations as MODELS (e.g. curvi-linear grid with initial and boundary conditions), the model codes are considered as TOOLS (e.g. Fortran), and the model output as DATA (e.g. netCDF files).

A number of schematisations are available in the OpenEarthModels repository.

Some related initiatives (which OpenEarth does not intend to compete with, but to share with and to learn from):