Skip to main content

Currently Skimming:

Summary
Pages 1-16

The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.


From page 1...
... Historical records are no longer likely to be reliable predictors of future events; climate change will affect the likelihood and severity of extreme weather and climate events, which are a leading cause of economic and human losses with total losses in the hundreds of billions of dollars over the past few decades.2 Computer models that simulate the climate are an integral part of providing climate information, in particular for future changes in the climate. Overall, climate modeling has made enormous progress in the past several decades, but meeting the information needs of users will require further advances in the coming decades.
From page 2...
... . FIGURE 1  Climate models can deliver useful forecasts for some phenomena a month to several seasons ahead, such as this spring flood risk outlook from NOAA's National Weather Service for 2011.
From page 3...
... FIGURE 2  Longer-time-scale climate projections can assist in long-term planning. The figure shows projected changes in annual average runoff by the middle of the 21st century.
From page 4...
... A NATIONAL STRATEGY FOR ADVANCING CLIMATE MODELING The U.S. climate modeling community is diverse and contains several large global climate modeling efforts and many smaller groups running regional climate models.
From page 5...
... Evolve to a common national software infrastructure that supports a diverse hierarchy of different models for different purposes, and which supports a vigorous research program aimed at improving the performance of climate models on extreme-scale computing architectures; 2. Convene an annual climate modeling forum that promotes tighter coordina tion and more consistent evaluation of U.S.
From page 6...
... ELEMENTS OF A NATIONAL STRATEGY FOR ADVANCING CLIMATE MODELING Evolve to Shared Software Infrastructure The entire climate modeling enterprise is computationally intensive. Over the past 15 years, major climate modeling groups have been forced to devote increasing attention to software engineering.
From page 7...
... The committee's vision is that, in a decade, all major U.S. climate models -- global and regional -- will share a single common software infrastructure that allows interoperability of model components (e.g., atmosphere, land, ocean, or sea ice)
From page 8...
... to carefully design, document, and refine one software infrastructure, and once users have learned it, their experience is transferable to using other model configurations and their output data structures. The committee recommends a community-based design and implementation process for achieving a national common software infrastructure.
From page 9...
... Convene a National Climate Modeling Forum To help bring together the nation's diverse and decentralized modeling communities and implement the new common software infrastructure, the committee recommends the establishment of an annual U.S. climate modeling forum in which scientists engaged in both global and regional climate model development and analysis from across the United States, as well as interested users, would gather to focus on timely and important cross-cutting issues related to U.S.
From page 10...
... Global Change Research Program might be a natural choice for organizing the forum given its mission to coordinate climate research activities in the United States. Nurture a Unified Weather-Climate Modeling Effort Unified weather-climate prediction models are increasingly an important part of the spectrum of climate models.
From page 11...
... To facilitate cross-fertilization with other climate modeling efforts, this effort should take advantage of the common software infrastructure and community-wide code and data accessibility described in the rest of this committee's strategy. Its success would be judged by simultaneous improvement of forecast skill metrics on all time scales.
From page 12...
... To address this need, the committee recommends developing a national education and accreditation program for "climate model interpreters" who can take technical findings and output from climate models, including quantified uncertainties, and use them in a diverse range of private- and public-sector applications. The education component could be a degree or certificate program offered by universities with adequate expertise in climate science and modeling, and the accreditation could be through a national organization that has a broad reach and is independent of any agency or modeling center, such as the AMS or the AGU.
From page 13...
... Develop a Training and Reward System for Climate Model Developers Model development is among the most challenging tasks in climate science, because it demands synthetic knowledge of climate physics, biogeochemistry, numerical analysis, and computing environments as well as the ability to work effectively in a large group. The committee recommends enticing high-caliber computer and climate scientists to become climate model developers using graduate fellowships in modeling centers, extended postdoctoral traineeships of 3-5 years, and rewards for model advancement through clear well-paid career tracks, institutional recognition, quick advancement, and adequate funding opportunities.
From page 14...
... As a general guideline for most effectively meeting future climate information needs, climate modeling activities should focus on problems whose solution will help climate models better inform societal needs, and for which progress is likely given adequate resources. With such focus, advances in Earth system modeling may yield significant progress in the next decade or two for a number of scientific questions, including sea-ice loss, icesheet stability, land-ocean ecosystem and carbon-cycle change, regional precipitation changes and extremes, cloud-climate interaction, and climate sensitivity.
From page 15...
... To facilitate this, the United States should more vigorously support research on uncertainty, including understanding and quantifying climate projection uncertainty, automating approaches to optimization of uncertain parameters within models, communicating uncertainty to both users of climate model output and decision makers, and developing deeper understanding on the relationship between uncertainty and decision making. FINAL COMMENTS Climate models are among the most sophisticated simulation tools developed by mankind and the "what-if" questions we are asking of them involve a mind-boggling number of connected systems.


This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More information on Chapter Skim is available.