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A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling (2012)

Chapter: Appendix B: Community Input

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Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Community Input." National Research Council. 2012. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13430.
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APPENDIX B

Community Input

In addition to reviewing relevant literature and using its expert judgment to write this report, the committee was responsible for providing opportunities for input from a full range of relevant stakeholders. This was facilitated through five open session meetings held in various cities around the United States (Washington, DC; Seattle, Washington; Irvine, California; and Boulder, Colorado), a series of interviews, and a climate modeling questionnaire. The open session meetings included one community workshop held in April 2011 in Boulder, Colorado, and involved a wide range of stakeholders from labs, agencies, academic institutions, international organizations, and the broad user community. All workshop participants were also asked to answer a threequestion questionnaire to share their thoughts about the current climate modeling landscape and ideas for a future strategy. The following individuals participated in at least one of the committee’s open session meetings and provided valuable input:

D. James Baker, William J. Clinton Foundation

Anjuli Bamzai, NSF

Pete Beckman, ANL

David Behar, San Francisco Public Utilities Commission

Cecilia Bitz, University of Washington

Andy Brown, UK Met Office

Frank Bryan, NCAR

Bill Collins, University of California, Berkeley

David Considine, NASA

Ted Cope, NGA

David Dewitt, Columbia University

Scott Doney, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Steve Easterbrook, University of Toronto

Dave Easterling, NOAA

Paul Edwards, University of Michigan

Jack Fellows, NCAR

Baruch Fischhoff, Carnegie Mellon University

Joe Friday, University of Oklahoma (Professor Emeritus)

Gregg Garfin, University of Arizona

Gary Geernaert, DOE

Peter Gent, NCAR

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Community Input." National Research Council. 2012. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13430.
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Jin Huang, NOAA

Kathy Jacobs, OSTP

Laurna Kaatz, Denver Water

Jill Karsten, NSF

Jeremy Kepner, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Jeff Kiehl, NCAR

Tim Killeen, NSF

Ben Kirtman, University of Miami

Chet Koblinsky, NOAA

Arun Kumar, NOAA

Bryan Lawrence, British Atmospheric Data Centre

Stu Levenbach, OMB

S.J. Lin, NOAA

Rich Loft, NCAR

Steve Lord, NOAA

Johannes Loschnigg, OSTP

Jim McWilliams, University of California, Los Angeles

Jerry Meehl, NCAR

Phil Mote, Oregon State University

Tim Palmer, European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts

Bill Putman, NASA

Erik Pytlak, Bonneville Power Administration

V. Ramaswamy, GFDL

David Randall, Colorado State University

Michele Rienecker, NASA

Todd Ringler, LANL

Rick Rosen, NOAA

Jagadish Shukla, George Mason University

Graeme Stephens, Colorado State University

Karl Taylor, Lawrence Livermore National Lab

Claudia Tebaldi, Climate Central

Rear Admiral David Titley, Navy

Kevin Trenberth, NCAR

Louis Uccellini, National Centers for Environmental Prediction

Andrew Weaver, University of Victoria

Mike Wehner, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

As described in Chapter 2, there have been a number of previous reports from the National Research Council and other organizations that have recommended activities

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Community Input." National Research Council. 2012. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13430.
×

to improve climate modeling in the United States. To inform the committee on ideas of what impacted the effectiveness of these previous reports, interviews were conducted with 11 individuals (listed below) who either held positions where they could use report recommendations to bolster policy decisions, or were in positions directly impacted by actions taken as a result of the report findings. These interviews were conducted by three researchers who have experience with climate-related research and have conducted interviews previously, but who had no affiliation with the current or previous reports. The interviewees were asked about their experiences and opinions on previous NRC reports, about their thoughts on important aspects of a national strategy for advancing climate modeling, and about their opinions on previous community efforts related to software infrastructure. No individual comments are attributed to the interviewees, but rather the information from these interviews was used to draw out general lessons, which are described in Chapter 2.

Interviewees

David Bader, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

D. James Baker, William J. Clinton Foundation

Rosina Bierbaum, University of Michigan

Guy Brasseur, Climate Service Center (Germany)

Paul Edwards, University of Michigan

David Evans, Noblis

Robert Ferraro, NASA

James Fischer, NASA

Timothy Killeen, National Science Foundation

David Randall, Colorado State University

Mariana Vertenstein, NCAR

Interviewers

Dr. Steve Easterbrook, University of Toronto

Dr. Christine Kirchhoff, University of Michigan

Dr. Jessica O’Reilly, St. John’s University

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Community Input." National Research Council. 2012. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13430.
×

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Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Community Input." National Research Council. 2012. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13430.
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Community Input." National Research Council. 2012. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13430.
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Community Input." National Research Council. 2012. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13430.
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Community Input." National Research Council. 2012. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13430.
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As climate change has pushed climate patterns outside of historic norms, the need for detailed projections is growing across all sectors, including agriculture, insurance, and emergency preparedness planning. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling emphasizes the needs for climate models to evolve substantially in order to deliver climate projections at the scale and level of detail desired by decision makers, this report finds. Despite much recent progress in developing reliable climate models, there are still efficiencies to be gained across the large and diverse U.S. climate modeling community. Evolving to a more unified climate modeling enterprise-in particular by developing a common software infrastructure shared by all climate researchers and holding an annual climate modeling forum-could help speed progress.

Throughout this report, several recommendations and guidelines are outlined to accelerate progress in climate modeling. The U.S. supports several climate models, each conceptually similar but with components assembled with slightly different software and data output standards. If all U.S. climate models employed a single software system, it could simplify testing and migration to new computing hardware, and allow scientists to compare and interchange climate model components, such as land surface or ocean models. A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling recommends an annual U.S. climate modeling forum be held to help bring the nation's diverse modeling communities together with the users of climate data. This would provide climate model data users with an opportunity to learn more about the strengths and limitations of models and provide input to modelers on their needs and provide a venue for discussions of priorities for the national modeling enterprise, and bring disparate climate science communities together to design common modeling experiments.

In addition, A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling explains that U.S. climate modelers will need to address an expanding breadth of scientific problems while striving to make predictions and projections more accurate. Progress toward this goal can be made through a combination of increasing model resolution, advances in observations, improved model physics, and more complete representations of the Earth system. To address the computing needs of the climate modeling community, the report suggests a two-pronged approach that involves the continued use and upgrading of existing climate-dedicated computing resources at modeling centers, together with research on how to effectively exploit the more complex computer hardware systems expected over the next 10 to 20 years.

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