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CCS: Institutes: CCRI: Background: Next Steps

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

Next Steps

Recognizing a need is the first step towards meeting it. Now, if we want to make a difference, its time for the next steps.

The first step in developing advanced climate simulations is to immediately make advanced computational resources available to climate sciences in order to develop the next generation of climate predictions. The computational infrastruture of CCS-CCRI is available now. Coordinated plans and actions by CCS-CCRI and DOE are well under way to improve CCS-CCRI's ability to meet the ever increasing computational requirements of the climate modeling community.

The second step in developing improved climate projections is to ensure the success of key climate modeling research projects. Key projects will be provided top priority access to CCS-CCRI computational infrastruture.

The third step in accelerating the development of advanced climate models is to document and improve the computational performance of PCM and Community Climate System Model (CCSM) on CCS computers as part of a continuing effort to efficiently utilize available computational resources. One of the goals of CCS-CCRI is to achieve multiple multi-year simulations of the Earth's climate that are required to accurately assess model uncertanties.

The fourth step is to improve the predictive capability of climate models by resolving the computational climate science issues of coupling climate and carbon models. Climate models are now being developed that include detailed sub-models of the terrestrial and oceanic carbon systems. This allows the feedbacks in the climate system to interact in an explicit way with the dynamics of the carbon system. CCS-CCRI will aggressively work with the international community to fully couple the global climate and carbon systems.

The fifth step is to provide to the research and assessment community a comprehensive analysis environment to support the analysis of climate simulation results. This step is critical to understand model projections and is needed by national climate assessment teams with legislative responsibility to evaluate U.S. vulnerbilities to climate change.

The sixth step is to continually meet the computational requirements of the computational climate and carbon research by growing terascale computing capability at CCS-CCRI. As the spatial resolution of the Earth system models becomes finer and the physics and dynamics protrayed in the Earth system models advances, the computational requirements grow in concert. CCS-CCRI will continue to obtain world-class computational facilities to meet the needs of the resolving atmospheric models, show a path from 1 to 40 to 100 Teraflops. The CCS-CCRI projects a development path stretching beyond the 40 Teraflop Japanese Earth Simulator to the next generation of 100+ Teraflop computing in the 21st Century.

The seventh step is pursuing an aggressive communications program by promoting the sharing of research findings in scientific journals and at national and internationally climate science conferences; recruiting, educating, and training new climate modelers; and hosting workshops to train non-climate researchers in the use and interpretation of climate model results.

The final, but no less important, step is to expand the number of collaborators working on advancing computational climate and carbon sciences within the CCS. The initial set of CCS-CCRI collaborators are research teams from Los Alamos National Labortory, Argonne National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, National Center for Atmospheric Research, and DOE's PCMDI. CCS-CCRI will broaden research particpation by collaborating with key university researchers supported by DOE and other federal agencies.