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CCS: Institutes: CCRI: Background: Enabling National Science Goals

• Key Science Question
• Thrust of CCS-CCRI
• Challenges
• Resources of CCS
• Next Steps
• Enabling National Science Goals
• Computational Sciences at DOE
• Current Research

Enabling National Science Goals

During the past decade, the scientific community has seen a spectacular increase in the understanding of the physical, chemical, and biological aspects of the Earth system, particularly its climate. Now, as the USGCRP enters its second decade, that program will focus on understanding the Earth system as a whole, on the dynamics of global change, and on connecting scientific knowledge to societal needs. CCS-CCRI's key science question closely matches the USGCRP's new agenda. Its mechanistic process studies, predictive focus, and multivariate capabilities ensure that predictions of future climate are available for analysis and interpretation.

The National Science Foundation has also entered into a significant effort, in collaboration with the ORNL CCS-CCRI team to refine the national global climate model, CCSM. This multi-agency research effort brings organized national research and development teams to bear on CCSM development.

CCS-CCRI provides the critical missing component in this national effort: the computational infrastructure needed to accelerate and advance climate predictions. Without advanced computational research facilities designed to enable the climate modeling research to evaluate the uncertainties in multiple climate modeling predictions, the validity of predictions about future climates will remain untested. CCS-CCRI provides this capability.

With the capabilities of the CCS-CCRI, U.S. climate scientists will be in a position comparable to that enjoyed by Japanese and European scientists. This will increase the potential for collaboration and cooperation at the international level.

CCS-CCRI's organizational characteristics and research objectives can be found in the designs for current or planned programs and facilities. What distinguishes CCS-CCRI from current and planned facilities is its capabilities to apply significant computational resources to specific problems predicting climate change. For example, simulating future climate scenarios requires many extended runs with different initial climate states so as to accurately assess uncertainties in climate predictions.

CCS-CCRI further distinguishes itself from other facilities by moving away from incremental and piecemeal approaches and by integrating critically important computational, climate, and carbon processes into a coupled climate-carbon model that is needed to address the environmental effects of energy production in a collaborative computational research environment.