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)

 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

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.