William Cooke
Research Physical Scientist at NOAA: National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration
Trenton, New Jersey, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolWilliam Cooke is a research physical scientist and seasoned application programmer with nearly two decades optimizing numerical models for high-performance computing environments. He has a strong track record porting and parallelizing climate and ocean models—adding OpenMP support and adapting code for Cray and IBM Power architectures—to improve scalability and throughput. At NOAA and UCAR he combined hands-on profiling and code refactoring with regression testing and user support, bridging research needs and production reliability. His open-source work on the widely used MOM6 ocean model includes numerical fixes, tracer implementations, and surface forcing improvements, showing deep expertise in model physics and computational robustness. Trained as a physicist (PhD-level) and experienced in legacy-to-Fortran90 migrations, he brings both scientific rigor and practical engineering to complex geophysical codebases. Based in Trenton, NJ, he quietly excels at making heavyweight scientific software run faster and more reliably across diverse supercomputing platforms.
18 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Experimental Physics, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Experimental Physics at National University of Ireland, Galway
English
Github Skills (8)
fortran10
climate-model10
numerical10
numerical-methods10
numeric10
modeling10
c119
c179
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
mom-ocean/MOM6
May 2016 - Dec 2021
Modular Ocean Model
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:17 commits, 21 PRs, 1 push in 5 years 7 months
Contributions summary:William primarily contributes to the Modular Ocean Model (MOM6) by adding and modifying core functionality. They implemented features like adding dye tracers, reading external distribution files, and fixing a bug related to halo pass checks, which suggests a strong focus on the model's computational aspects. They also worked on the horizontal viscosity module and the diabatic driver, demonstrating expertise in numerical modeling and parameterization within the ocean model. Furthermore, the user addressed issues and made updates to the surface forcing components and geometry files, and they addressed division by zero errors in code.
numerical-modelingocean-circulationoceanfortranocean-model
wfcooke/MOM6
May 2016 - Jul 2025
Modular Ocean Model
Contributions:15 PRs, 44 pushes, 36 branches in 9 years 3 months
oceanocean-modelmodular
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