Table of Contents

Subcommittee on Global Change Research, Participating Agencies and Executive Offices

Ad hoc Working Group on Climate Modeling

Foreword

Executive Summary

1. Background

2. Summary of Findings

3. Summary of recommen- dations

4. Final Comments

Charge to the Working Group 

Main Report

1. Purpose

2. Current Situation

3. Scope of Document / Underlying Definitions and Assumptions

4. Elements of Climate Science

5. Issues of Computational Systems

6. Human resources

7. Management / Business Practices / Institutional models

8. Recommen- dations

9. Reference Documents

10. Endnotes

Full Report (PDF)

The details of implementation of the Climate Service will require significant planning and be dependent on a number of interrelated decisions that must be made by the Agencies. Strong leadership is required, both within the Agencies and at a level higher than the Agencies. The implementation can and should be incremental. In fact, we believe that with the definition of a stable vision there are a number of existing activities that could form the core of a future Climate Service. There are already moves by all of the Agencies to better integrate and unify modeling and computational activities. If these can be orchestrated towards a long-term vision, then substantial steps can be taken while the details of the Climate Service are developed and evolved. Again, without a new business model and management strategies within which to organize the Climate Service, there is a danger of simply rearranging the current activities, which will not be successful.

Finally, we emphasize that is artificial to speak of a climate-science capability, a national climate service, without integration of modeling and data (i.e. observational) activities. As charged, we addressed the data activities, but they were not explored in as much depth as the modeling activities. We state, explicitly, that many of the same underlying problems affect the environmental data undertakings of the U.S. as affect the modeling community, and integrated, systematic solutions are ultimately needed. Additional funding is crucial to both develop foundation climate observing systems and to integrate and maintain existing data sets for climate applications.