A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling (2012) / Chapter Skim
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14 A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling
14 A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling
Pages 239-248
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From page 239... ...
climate modeling enterprise will have to evolve substantially to meet national needs and stay internationally competitive. As described throughout the report, a primary driver for this evolution will be the need to work effectively and increasingly closely with a diverse user community, from design of simulations to choice of outputs, tools for their analysis and distribution, and communicating uncertainty.
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climate modeling enterprise -- across modeling efforts, across a hierarchy of model types, across modeling communities focused on different space and time scales, and across model developers and model output users. The committee recommends a national strategy for advancing the climate modeling enterprise in the next two decades, consisting of four main new components and five supporting elements that, while less novel, are equally important (Figure 14.1)
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. If adopted, this strategy provides a path for the United States to move forward into the next generation of climate models to provide the best possible climate information for the nation.
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Recommendation 4.1: As a general guideline, priority should be given to climate modeling activities that have a strong focus on problems that intersect the space where (i) addressing societal needs requires guidance from climate models and (ii)
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To facilitate this, the United States should more vigorously support research on uncertainty, including • nderstanding and quantifying uncertainty in the projection of future climate change, u including how best to use the current observational record across all time scales; • ncorporating uncertainty characterization and quantification more fully in the climate i modeling process; • ommunicating uncertainty to both users of climate model output and decision makers; c and • eveloping deeper understanding on the relationship between uncertainty and decision d making so that climate modeling efforts and characterization of uncertainty are better brought in line with the true needs for decision making. Recommendation 7.1: The United States should attempt to entrain top students into choosing climate model development as a career by providing more graduate and postgraduate training opportunities, enhanced professional recognition and career advancement for participation in climate model development projects, and adequate incentives to attract software engineers who could also choose private-sector careers.
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climate modeling community should work together to establish a common software infrastructure designed to facilitate componentwise interoperability and data exchange across the full hierarchy of global and regional models and model types in the United States. Recommendation 10.2: In order to address the climate data needs of decision makers and other users, the United States should invest in more research aimed at improving the performance of climate models on the highly concurrent computer architectures expected in the next 1020 years, and should sustain the availability of state-of-the-art computing systems for climate modeling.
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Recommendation 11.2: To reduce sources of uncertainty in climate simulations, the United States should pursue a coordinated research effort to use weather and/or seasonal/interannual hindcast simulations to systematically constrain uncertain parameters and to improve parameterizations in its major climate models. Recommendation 12.1: To promote the effective application of climate models, the United States should develop climate interpretation certification and continuing education programs to train a cadre of climate interpreters who can facilitate the interpretation of climate model output into usable information for a variety of decision makers and communicate user needs to climate modelers.
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In 10-20 years, our global climate models will simulate more ramifications of climate change and variability, such as much more sophisticated modeling of ice sheets and ice margins, and biological responses to climate change in land and ocean. Models of human-climate interaction will be much more sophisticated, better tested, and widely used.
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In the United States, research and operational weather, regional climate, and global climate modeling will be done within a common software infrastructure with a set of dynamical cores and physical parameterizations that work across a broad range of scales. Within a decade, the international climate modeling community will understand whether useful prediction of "decadal" climate variability on time scales of 2-10 years is scientifically viable; if it is, the United States will be a major player in the context of an international collaborative effort.
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The committee believes that the best path forward is a strategy centered around the integration of the decentralized U.S. climate modeling enterprise -- across modeling efforts, across a hierarchy of model types, across modeling communities focused on different space and time scales, and between model developers and model output users.
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