Floating Point Precision Issues

We aim to use Float64 and Flat32 precision in CliMA's ESM. Here is a summary of some challenges / things to be aware of:

Basics

• Float32: a 32-bit float can represent up to 7 decimal numbers
• Float64:

eps() in Julia

julia> eps(zero(Float64))
5.0e-324

julia> eps(one(Float64))
2.220446049250313e-16

julia> eps(zero(Float32))
1.0f-45

julia> eps(one(Float32))
1.1920929f-7

see Julia docs for more info.