Report calls for measures to advance climate modeling

Abstract

While climate modeling has made enormous strides over the past several decades, a critical step toward making more rapid, efficient, and coordinated progress in modeling would require “an evolutionary change in U.S. climate modeling institutions away from developing multiple completely independent models toward a collaborative approach,” according to a 7 September report by a committee of the U.S. National Research Council's Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (BASC). “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 timescales, and between model developers and model output users,” the report notes. “A diversity of approaches is necessary for progress in many areas of climate modeling and is vital for addressing the breadth of users needs.” Entitled A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling, the report states that, “If adopted, this strategy of increased unification amidst diversity will allow the United States to more effectively meet the climate information needs of the Nation in the coming decades and beyond.”