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2 Lessons from Previous Reports on Climate Modeling
Pages 47-60

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From page 47...
... . The interviewees are individuals who TABLE 2.1  Previous Reports and Articles on Improving Climate Modeling in the United States Consulted in this Review Year Author Report Title 1979 NRC Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment 1982 NRC Meeting the Challenge of Climate 1985 NRC The National Climate Program: Early Achievements and Future Directions 1986 NRC Atmospheric Climate Data, Problems and Promises 1990 Changnon et NOAA Climate Services Plan al.
From page 48...
... PREVIOUS REPORTS Reports from the 1970s and 1980s The possibility of climate change caused by carbon dioxide emissions has been a subject of concern to the U.S. government at least since the administration of Lyndon Johnson (Johnson, 1965)
From page 49...
... At the time of Improving the Effectiveness, the prominent societal need was assessment of climate change and its impacts on regional, national, and global scales. The report also placed climate modeling as part of a larger enterprise that includes a climate observing system, high-performance computer systems, software frameworks, human resources, analysis environments, and organizational support for the interface of climate modeling activities to greater societal needs.
From page 50...
... ; hence, climate modeling capacity was de facto inadequate, and the goal of the report was to get an actionable understanding of this inadequacy. High-End Climate Science focused on the fragmentation of U.S.
From page 51...
... LESSONS FROM THE RESPONSES TO PREVIOUS REPORTS The reports described here paint a consistent picture over the two decades: individual researchers and small groups in the United States perform leading-edge, discovery climate science research, which generates knowledge, but there is a recognized need to synthesize this knowledge and perform integrated, "high-end," product-oriented research and implementation to address specific problems. Many other formal and informal reports from authors at all professional levels have expressed concerns 51
From page 52...
... Finding 2.1: Previous reports can influence strategic thinking within the government at the program level, and reports are generally most useful if they include practical recommendations. Importance of Software Infrastructure Both Improving the Effectiveness and High-End Climate Science made strong recommendations about the development of software infrastructure to support (1)
From page 53...
... Many of these activities remain active today, with significant project-based, bottom-up emergence of organized communities and evolving community governance, for example, the Global Organization of Earth System Science Portals,2 the Earth Systems Grid Federation,3 and the Global Interoperability Program.4 In addition, NOAA established the Climate Test Bed in 2005 to "accelerate the transfer of research and development into improved NOAA operational climate forecasts, products, and applications." In 2010, NOAA and DOE initiated the National ClimateComputing Research Center at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, representing a significant strategic change in provision of computational resources for climate-focused computing. NASA specifically refocused its primary Earth science computational center as the NASA Center for Climate Simulation.
From page 54...
... In U.S. climate organizations, management directive or management perception of improved organizational efficiencies does not, first and foremost, motivate adoption of infrastructure.
From page 55...
... At that time, one of the reasons that European models were considered to be more prominently cited in assessment studies was attributed to the investment in software infrastructure. An archetypal example was the European Center for Medium-range Weather Forecasts, where infrastructure was viewed as an essential part of ECMWF's strategy to sustain excellent science, to engage external collaborators, and to stay ahead of changes in computational hardware.
From page 56...
... Need for Climate Information The reports from the late 1990s and early 2000s called for the development of capabilities that were specifically focused on regular delivery of a set of user-driven climate products and the need for some type of organizational or institutional entity responsible and accountable for their delivery. High-End Climate Science made the specific recommendation of "two major core simulation activities": one center formed from existing operational capabilities in the National Weather Service and another center to be federated from existing climate modeling assets; this recommendation did not get adopted, but it did heighten awareness of the need to coordinate research-driven and user-driven modeling.
From page 57...
... Our interviewees strongly and broadly valued maintaining a diversity of approaches within the suite of climate modeling activities, offering justifications based on scientific, organizational, and mission-related reasons. Several also noted that diversity poses risks to the effectiveness of the climate modeling enterprise ranging from systematic fragmentation and the potential perception of uncertainty regarding climate information from outside the science community.
From page 58...
... The America's Climate Choices report describes the current view of USGCRP and the Climate Change Adaptation Task Force: The USGCRP and the Climate Change Adaptation Task Force have largely been con fined to convening representatives of relevant agencies and programs for dialogue, without mechanisms for making or enforcing important decisions and priorities. The NRC Advisory Board for USGCRP, convened in 2011, noted in a review of the recently released 2012 USGCRP Strategic Plan that USGCRP needs a stronger overall governance structure, including an ability to compel reallocation of funds to serve the program's overarching priorities (NRC, 2012b)
From page 59...
... coordinates and integrates federal research on changes in the global environment and their implications for society. The USGCRP began as a presidential initiative in 1989 and was mandated by Congress in the Global Change Research Act of 1990, which called for "a comprehensive and integrated United States research program which will assist the Nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change."a Thirteen departments and agencies participate in USGCRP, which was known as the U.S.
From page 60...
... Finding 2.4: Previous reports have consistently called for more coordination and consolidation of climate modeling agencies and institutions, but these have met with limited success. The emergence of bottom-up community governance offers new strategies for working-level decision making to support integrated and balanced planning and implementation.


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