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enhanced through refereed workshops to discuss the pertinent scientific and associated societal issues and to recommend priorities. Effective collaborative linkages between process studies and modeling groups should also be encouraged to facilitate the difficult task of developing, implementing, and testing new model parameterizations. In addition, increased coordination of research-based and operational modeling activities will help ensure that expertise in these two communities is shared. These are but a few of the types of coordinating activities that should be vigorously and consistently pursued.

The CRC finds that the United States lags behind other countries in its ability to model long-term climate change. Those deficiencies limit the ability of the United States:

1. to predict future climate states and thus:

a) assess the national and international value and impact of climate change;

b) formulate policies that will be consistent with national objectives and be compatible with global commitments;

2. to most effectively advance understanding of the underlying scientific issues pertaining to climate variability and change.

Although collaboration and free and open information and data exchange with foreign modeling centers are critical, it is inappropriate for the United States to rely heavily upon foreign centers to provide high-end modeling capabilities. There are a number of reasons for this, including the following:

1. U.S. scientists do not necessarily have full, open, and timely access to output from European models, particularly as the commercial value of these predictions and scenarios increases in the future.2

2. Decisions that might substantially affect the U.S. economy might be made based upon considerations of simulations (e.g., nestedgrid runs) produced by countries with different priorities than those of the United States.

2U.S. researchers, however, do currently have access to output from most simulations of transient climate change produced by foreign models.