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Table of Contents
Subcommittee on
Global Change Research, Participating Agencies and Executive Offices
Ad hoc Working
Group on Climate Modeling
Foreword
Executive Summary
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Background
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Summary of
Findings
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Summary
of recommen- dations
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Final Comments
Charge to the Working
Group
Main Report
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Purpose
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Current Situation
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Scope of Document /
Underlying Definitions and Assumptions
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Elements of
Climate Science
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Issues of
Computational Systems
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Human
resources
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Management /
Business Practices / Institutional models
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Recommen-
dations
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Reference
Documents
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Endnotes
Full Report (PDF)
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Formation of a Climate
Service
o A Climate Service with a well-defined
mission should be chartered to deliver simulation and related data
products for understanding climate processes and predicting future states
of the climate system.
- Built upon existing expertise.
- Clear separation of Climate Service
functions from current Agency obligations.
- Not be located or assigned to any Agency
or Center within the current multi-Agency framework.
o We propose that an independent service,
which is a concerted federation of the appropriate current agency
capabilities, should be formed. The existing agencies need to act like
member states, drawing from a concept successfully used in the European
Union.
Management and Business
Practices
Without a new business model incremental
funding of existing organizations will not provide needed capabilities. The
Climate service requires:
o An integrating management structure.
- Executive decision-making process.
- Supporting incentive structure.
o Supporting business practices.
o Appropriate types of external review and
oversight process.
- Stability
- Insulation from short-term programmatic
volatility
Computational Resources
The Climate Service requires:
o Dedicated computational resources with the
highest level of capability. Computational resources must be:
- aligned with the generation of the
Climate Service products (i.e. application driven).
- under the management of the Climate
Service.
o U.S. policy on high performance
computing adversely affects the Earth sciences.
- This increases both the expense and risk
associated with climate science.
Number of centers /
integration
o We recommend two major core simulation
activities.
- The first is focused on weather and
should build from the National Weather Service.
- The second is focused on climate, and
its definition requires successfully addressing a number of the
strategic and organizational issues discussed throughout this document.
- The decisions on what should be
included in a nascent climate service, e.g. seasonal-to-interannual,
greenhouse scenarios, chemistry, data assimilation, etc., are among
the most difficult to reconcile. There is a need to integrate
activities across institutions and disciplines to address human
resource issues, to maintain similar levels of comprehensiveness as
foreign centers, and to keep up with scientific evolution. This is in
conflict with the difficult management challenges that suggest the
initial implementation of the Climate Service should be as simple as
possible. The complexities of the integration issues are beyond the
scope of the current deliberations.
- It is critical that initial steps
be made to develop a credible and competitive high-end climate
capability, and we are concerned that potential agency and political
positioning over the location and running of a potential Climate
Service will delay its formation.
- The Weather Service and the Climate
Service should undertake the development of the formation a unifying
infrastructure to allow effective transfer of expertise and algorithms.
Size and budget of core simulation
capability for Climate Service
o On the order of 150 scientists, software
engineers, and application-directed computational scientists, programmers,
and computer scientists need to be dedicated to the modeling capabilities
of the Climate Service.
o The total funding for the modeling and
computing component of the Climate Service is on the order of $50 M.
- There are large uncertainties in this
number because of computational policy issues that are beyond the scope
of the climate-science community. The $50 M is a lower limit.
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