You & ORCHIDEE

Fair Use Policy for ORCHIDEE

The fair use policy is designed to ensure that the individuals and teams that develop the ORCHIDEE model receive proper credit for their work.

We first define the model code, drivers and run environment as the overall ORCHIDEE environment. Maintaining a state of the art ORCHIDEE environment come with a significant investment of time for coding, debugging and evaluating the impacts of any developments (biogeochemical, physical and anthropogenic processes) on the overall performance of the model. The fair use policy will help recognizing the intellectual contribution of the individuals who contributed to the ORCHIDEE environment.

The policy applies to the use of a referenced version described below. This model version is freely available; it is furnished by the ORCHIDEE project group who encourage its use. Please kindly inform by email (orchidee-projet at ipsl.jussieu.fr) how you will use the model and of any publication plans.  The scientists who provided the ORCHIDEE environment or potentially existing model outputs will tell you if they feel they should be acknowledged or offered participation as co-authors. We assume that an agreement on such matters will be reached before publishing and/or use of the data for publication. If your work directly competes with an ongoing investigation, the scientists who provided the ORCHIDEE environment or model output may ask to have the opportunity to submit a manuscript before you submit your study with ORCHIDEE.

Recognition of intellectual contributions to the ORCHIDEE environment will be ensured by:

  • Offering co-authorship on any publication that benefits of recent improvements in the ORCHIDEE environment. We deliberately refrain from specifying ‘recent’ as it should be function of the intellectual contribution and the exposure this contribution already received.
  • Discussing, early on, intended usage of recent improvements in the ORCHIDEE environment. This discussion should prevent uses and/or applications of the ORCHIDEE environment which are in conflict with the plans of the main contributor.

The fair use policy is designed as a win-win opportunity for both users and developers of the ORCHIDEE environment. It warrants the continuation of ambitious model developments and thus contributes to safeguarding our leadership in land surface modelling.

How to use ORCHIDE


1) Free use of a referenced version

The version that was used for the CMIP5 exercice is freely available.
Access to the code:

  • Downloading and running the code: Given the current limited engineering staff within the ORCHIDEE group, we can not provide the full support that would be needed to install and easily run the model on any server. In this context, please contact a relevant person from the ORCHIDEE project team (see list of the core team) to establish a more direct collaboration in order to benefit from the support/investment of an ORCHIDEE expert.

Support: see the online documentation

2) Use of follow-up more recent versions

ORCHIDEE is a continuously evolving research tool. Despite the efforts of documenting and validating tags before their release, new users are likely to require help to correctly use the full functionality of ORCHIDEE and its run environment. For this purpose, we ask  new users to establish a direct contact with someone from the ORCHIDEE project group (see list of the core team) or by sending an email to orchidee-projet at ipsl.jussieu.fr with the explanation of your intended use of ORCHIDEE.

Note that we organize regular training days detailing the scientific basis of the model as well as the technical aspects of its run environment.
For new users, the first line of support is the ORCHIDEE wiki (online documentation). The second line of support is the supervisor or contact person in the core team. For users who participated in the training days and have a formal working agreement with the ORCHIDEE project team a third line of support is the help mailing list orchidee-help.at.ipsl.jussieu.fr.Requests for support from unregistered users, non-academic users or users without a working agreement with someone from the “ORCHIDEE-Project team” will not be considered through by the help mailing list.

We may need your expertise

The IPSL (Institut Pierre Simon Laplace) gathers 9 laboratories whose research topics focus on the global environment with a common strategy for the study of the Earth System as a whole A major research mission is to contribute to a better understanding of the interactions between human activities in the Earth System, environment and climate dynamics at different time scales. If you have a PhD in mathematics, physics, engineering, computer science, meteorology, or physiology, or you believe that your skills could contribute to the development of ORCHIDEE as the land surface component of the IPSL Earth System model, feel free to send us your CV, a customized letter of motivation and three names of people who are willing to act as references.