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CCS: Institutes: CCRI: Background: Key Science Question

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

Key Science Question

Fossil fuel combustion for energy production is altering the chemical makeup of the Earth's atmosphere. The consequences for climate change and the potential for significant, even catastrophic, nonlinear feedbacks through the Earth system are topics of significant international debate. These global changes, principally driven by human activities at regional scales, require us to acquire an unprecedented understanding of potential regional and global changes in our environment, economy, and society.

Climate scientists today face challenging uncertainties about how climate systems will respond to future environmental changes. There are many compelling questions that must be answered if we are to predict future climate and gain the understanding needed to assess and ameliorate the potential impacts of energy use. The key science question that drives the development of CCS-CCRI is complex and complicated. Simply put, it is

How will the Earth's climate respond to physical, chemical, and biological changes produced by global alterations of the atmosphere, ocean, and land?

The role of CCS-CCRI is to meld the software engineering, computer architectures, and benchmarking and analysis tools with state-of-the-art numerical climate models to give the most accurate future climate predictions possible. The ability to use terascale computational capabilities to simulate hundreds of years of the Earth's atmospheric and biogeochemical processes is the core of CCS-CCRI's climate and carbon science skills and forms the structural basis for answering the key science question.

During the next decade, the climate sciences must advance and provide an insightful understanding of the climate of the future:

• Which pieces of the climate system will be most severely impacted, and when?


• What will climate systems of the future look like?


• What climate can be expected in specific regions throughout the world?

These and many other questions will drive climate research requirements in the immediate future and for the next several decades.

Designing numerical models to address these questions is the grand challenge for climate scientists working to understand climate systems of the future. It mandates that CCS-CCRI must have the capability to develop advanced climate models that can predict what climatological conditions are expected to prevail in the mid-twenty-first century and beyond. Such simulations serve as probes for discovering and quantifying climate processes and provide the understanding of climate responses to a changing atmospheric chemistry required to answer the key science question highlighted above.