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Strategic Goal 1: Improve Understanding of the Atmosphere, the Earth System, and the Sun

The National Science Foundation supports the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to advance basic research in the United States in the atmospheric and related sciences in support of the university community. As a federally-funded research and development center, NCAR is able to sustain a long-term commitment to this scientific enterprise. Our research and understanding of the atmosphere, the Earth System, and the Sun and their environments is essential to fulfilling our other strategic goals. We pursue this basic research to advance our knowledge. Concurrently, we also are able to improve the modeling, computing, and observational facilities we provide; and, to transfer the results of our work to the public and private sector.

Our research includes atmospheric chemistry; meteorology, solar physics, solar-terrestrial interactions, and the Earth's upper atmosphere; climate research; societal impacts of climate change and severe weather; biogeochemistry; water cycle; geophysical turbulence; and applied mathematics and statistical analysis. We conduct our research in close collaboration with university partners; local, state and federal agencies; and with strategic international partners and private sector sponsors. Our goal is also to make our research accessible and widely available.

NCAR addresses four broad priorities within this goal:

Priority 1: Exploring Atmospheric, Earth System, and Solar Processes, Variability and Change

Exploring atmospheric, Earth system, and solar processes, and the variability and change of these processes, are critical components to reaching NCAR's Strategic Goal #1. Exploration into these areas includes: simulation of natural Earth system variability, research on magnetic-flux eruptions from the sun, and understanding the effects of gravity waves, including the coupling between the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere. Read more about this priority

Priority 2: Investigating the Interactions of the Atmosphere, the Broader Earth System and Human Society

In the past, meteorology and climatology were considered separate fields, largely because of disparate time and length scales. Today, the two fields are strongly coupled, not only because climate provides boundaries for investigating the weather, but also because localized events can influence larger climatological scales. NCAR’s activities in this area range from collecting in situ data to better understand climate, weather and related phenomena, to developing and analyzing ways to better model natural processes and working with university partners to devise ways of tackling scientific questions. Read more about this priority

Priority 3: Improving Prediction of Weather , Climate, and Other Atmospheric Phenomena

Understanding of the Earth system is a prerequisite to predicting its behavior, the latter being, however, of a more direct use to many components of society. In that context, for this priority, the key activities within NCAR’s laboratories range from improving climate models, to exploring new approaches to prediction across scales, and global and local weather prediction. Read more about this priority

Priority 4: Developing Community Models

Developing numerical models and making them available to the scientific community is at the heart of NCAR's research and service to the community. Key activities in this priority are creating and adding to community models, research models, as well as progressing toward creation of an Earth system model. Read more about this priority