Cecelia Deluca (PI)
University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
cdeluca@ucar.edu

Common Modeling Infrastructure in Support of the US Climate Change Science Program

We propose a program of development and deployment of common modeling infrastructure as a means of strengthening the technical and scientific interactions amongst the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Community Climate System Model (CCSM), the climate program at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), and the emergent NASA Modeling, Analysis and Prediction (MAP) Climate Variability and Change program.    The proposed activity will establish the Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) as a mature scientific tool.  The ESMF project is an ambitious, multi-agency initiative to create common modeling infrastructure for the climate and weather community that unifies and extends early frameworks such as the Flexible Modeling System (FMS) from GFDL, the Goddard Earth Modeling System (GEMS), and the NCAR CCSM flux coupler.  It began in February 2002, with three years of funding obtained through the NASA Cooperative Agreement Notice entitled Increasing Interoperability and Performance of Grand Challenge Applications in the Earth, Space, Life and Microgravity Sciences.  The result of that initial period of funding will be an advanced prototype of the framework, and a set of prototype experiments and applications that demonstrate the use of ESMF.  These prototype applications include ESMF-enabled versions of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) forecasting system, GFDL models, the CCSM, the Weather Research and Forecast Model (WRF), the new Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS-5) model, the Global Institute for Space Studies (GISS) ModelE, MITgcm, and others.  The expected outcome of this follow-on activity is the evolution of the ESMF into a reliable, high performance, fully functional and fully supported package, and its installation in production research and operational systems.  The funding requested herein will leverage contributions to ongoing development that have already been committed by the Department of Defense (DoD) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).  The codes that we will concentrate on are climate models at NCAR, GFDL, and NASA Goddard.  The establishment of a common framework will facilitate interactions such as model comparisons, code exchanges, and the introduction of new capabilities such as active chemistry and integration with data assimilation packages.  The proposed work implements specific objectives outlined in The Strategic Plan for the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP), henceforth referred to as the CCSP Plan.  In doing so, it serves to integrate NASA modeling and data collection efforts into a coordinated national climate research program.

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