The continued development and refinement of computational models that can simulate the evolution of the Earth system is critical for the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Such models can be used to look backward to test the consistency of our knowledge of Earth system forcing and response over time periods of interest, and forward for calculating the response of the Earth system to projected future forcing.
Models are exceedingly valuable tools for the development of scientific understanding.
They also are critical to the environmental assessments used to synthesize Earth science results and provide information to decisionmakers. Significant progress has been made in the development and application of atmospheric chemistry, ecosystem, and climate models. However, the U.S. system of distributed centers for modeling and supercomputing has produced both benefits and problems, especially for climate modeling. But it has not facilitated the development of the kind of product-driven modeling activities that are especially important for making climate model information more usable and applicable to the broader global change research community. Over the past several years, a number of internal and external analyses have identified significant problems with the U.S. climate modeling effort.