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Advancing NCAR's strategic goals

NCAR's January 2006 Strategic Plan, NCAR as an Integrator, Innovator and Community Builder, outlines five strategic goals and the priorities for achieving each. CISL supports NCAR's mission, vision, values, goals, and priorities by:

  • Provisioning hardware, software, and grid cyberinfrastructure in a robust supercomputing facility
  • Conducting research in mathematics, statistics, and computational science that targets significant improvements in geosciences simulation
  • Developing, funding, and conducting education initiatives to prepare the next generation of U.S. scientists and engineers for the era of petascale supercomputing

Individual projects in CISL's FY2008 Annual Report support many of the goals and priorities in NCAR's strategic plan. CISL's overall efforts focus primarily on NCAR's strategic goals to 1) Provide robust, accessible, and innovative information services and tools and 2) Cultivate a scientifically literate and engaged citizenry and a diverse and creative workforce.

Each section of this report specifies which of the NCAR strategic goals and priorities are supported by the work described in that section. For example, the multi-year project of integrating the Community Atmosphere Model (CAM) with a dynamical core in CISL's High-Order Method Modeling Environment (HOMME), HOMME-CAM integration using HOMME's spectral-element dynamical core, supports NCAR's strategic plan on multiple levels:

  • Efforts to accurately simulate observed processes in Earth's atmosphere support NCAR's mission "To understand the behavior of the atmospheric and related systems and the global environment."
  • The HOMME project supports NCAR's strategic goal of "Developing community models for weather, climate, atmospheric chemistry, and solar-terrestrial research."
  • HOMME also advances NCAR's strategic priorities of "Developing and providing advanced services and tools" and "Creating an Earth system knowledge environment."

In general, our FY2008 Annual Report is organized to demonstrate how CISL projects support NCAR's strategic plan:

NCAR Strategic Goal 4: Provide robust, accessible, and innovative information services and tools

NCAR Strategic Goal 3: Cultivate a scientifically literate and engaged citizenry and a diverse and creative workforce