How Can We Advance Our Weather and Climate Models as a Community?

A common modeling infrastructure ad hoc working group evolved from an NSF/NCEP workshop in 1998, in recognition of the need for the climate and weather modeling communities to develop a more organized approach to building the software that underlies modeling and data analyses. With its significant investment of pro bono time, the working group made the first steps in this direction. It suggested standards for model data and model physics and explored the concept of a modeling software framework. An overall software infrastructure would facilitate separation of the scientific and computational aspects of comprehensive models. Consequently, it would allow otherwise isolated scientists to effectively contribute to core U.S. modeling activities, and would provide a larger market to computational scientists and computer vendors, hence encouraging their support.