The use of the Climate-science Computational End Station (CCES) development and grand challenge team for the next IPCC assessment: an operational plan

W M Washington, J Drake, L Buja, D Anderson, D Bader, R Dickinson, D Erickson, P Gent, S Ghan, P Jones, R Jacob
2008 Journal of Physics, Conference Series  
The Climate Science Computational End Station 1 is focused on The Grand Challenge of Climate Change Science, which is to predict future climates based on scenarios of anthropogenic emissions and other changes resulting from options in energy and development policies. Addressing this challenge requires a Climate Science Computational End Station (CCES) consisting of a sustained climate model research, development and application program combined with world-class DOE leadership computing
more » ... to enable advanced computational simulation of the Earth System. This proposal provides the primary computer allocations for the DOE SciDAC and Climate Change Prediction Program (CCPP). It builds on the successful interagency collaboration of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in developing and applying the Community Climate System Model (CCSM) for climate change science. It also includes collaboration with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in carbon data assimilation and university partners with expertise in high end computational climate research. In it's fourth year, the CCES advances climate science through both an aggressive model development activity and an extensive suite of climate model application simulations. Subproject allocations are subject to external scientific review of specific proposed computational experiments. The required computing resources and the scientific goals of the proposed CCES are compatible and consistent with the DOE Office of Science (DOE-SC) Strategic Plan, the Federal Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) Strategic Plan, and the CCSM Strategic Business Plan for 2004-2008 and with the CCSM Science Plan. 2 This multi-year project includes an ambitious simulation plan emphasizing model application with an ongoing, core model development that envisions future needs and scales the CCSM for use on petascale computer systems. The CCSM3 is the current state-of-the-science model that accurately simulates global to continental aspects of the physical climate system. Extensive simulations with higher resolution versions of the current model are under investigation to identify and correct bias errors that are unacceptable for future simulations that require sub-continental and smaller scale accuracy. Using high resolution ocean and ice models, the future simulation schedule also includes studies of abrupt climate change, in which large global scale changes occur within a few decades. The CCSM3 requires the specification of changes to many factors that determine climate change, such as the atmospheric 1 The creation of Computational End Stations provides the scientific applications software and world-class computational resources needed for researchers in various areas of science. 2 These are available online at
doi:10.1088/1742-6596/125/1/012024 fatcat:uu4avju4zjaghbn4ebth5sx37i