Empowering Society

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is a true community partner in fostering research and in building human capacity in the atmospheric and related sciences. My first experience at NCAR was as a supercomputing fellow in 1976, which led to three years of dissertation work in collaboration with NCAR scientists and then a post-doctoral fellowship in the Advanced Study Program. Since that first experience, nearly 400 post-doctoral fellows have been hosted by NCAR. In my case, a graduate student fellowship and a post-doctoral experience have resulted in a life-long connection to NCAR. I worked as a ladder scientist from 1981 to 1985, then served as a member of community committees while at Penn State, and then I was elected as a trustee for the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), NCAR’s managing body, and I became Chairman of the UCAR Board in 2007. In spite of a long-standing admiration, and recognition that NCAR has played a transformative role in my career, my appreciation of NCAR has increased in the few months that I’ve had the privilege of working here.

With National Science Foundation funding, NCAR provides an extraordinary level of service, support and research that is of critical importance to society. Whether offering assistance to the research community or pursuing answers to scientific questions, NCAR is marked by the high caliber of its staff and capabilities. The variety of NCAR Annual Report (NAR) highlights underscores this reality.

This year’s annual report features only a few of the many scientific efforts engaged in by NCAR and our community’s scientists. By focusing on five themes— Regional Climate Change, Science at the Terascale and Beyond, Empowering Society to Cope with Weather and Climate, Technology: Bringing Innovation to the Fore, and Energizing Science with the Community Climate System Model —we provide a snapshot of NCAR competencies, facilities, and the community-wide accomplishments achieved in Fiscal Year 2008. Additional details on the support, tools, and research efforts being pursued within NCAR’s four Laboratories can be found in the Laboratory Annual Reports.

These five themes were selected for their prominence in terms of scientific and societal relevance and interest. For example, with climate change a recognized reality, society is increasingly demanding information and understanding of how these changes will affect individuals, cities, states and nations. Changes to regional climate will vary—some areas will receive more precipitation, some less, temperatures will be higher in some places than in others, some coastal areas will be affected by sea level rise, etc. Decision makers and ecosystem managers need regional-scale information to address potential challenges, making regional climate research a priority for atmospheric and Earth system scientists both at NCAR and in the community we serve.

Models can help answer questions about regional—and global—climate and weather. However, as understanding of Earth system dynamics and interactions grows, models grow increasingly complex, requiring greater processing power to generate climate scenarios in a timely fashion. Scientific needs are demanding petascale (the ability to generate arithmetic calculations at a sustained rate in excess of 1,000-trillion operations per second) computing resources, technology, and problem-solving environments. NSF, NCAR and the community are working together to supply such capabilities by providing the required infrastructure, expertise, and educational opportunities needed to meet the demands of the coming petascale era.

Apparatus capable of supporting weather- and climate-related decisions span beyond models. Many of the tools and technology developed at NCAR are created for our community, agencies, and society to minimize or provide notice of the adverse effects of weather and climate. Whether improving short-term weather forecasts, delivering early warning of hurricane landfall location, or supporting remote sensing of upper atmospheric disturbances that could affect satellite communications, NCAR tools, software and services are designed to address these issues.

As part of our mandate from NSF to support community research activities, many of the tools and technology mentioned above are created in-house, in collaboration with community members. Whether designing and fabricating scientific instrumentation, augmenting existing algorithms to meet new research needs, or consulting with public and private organizations on questions related to weather, climate, and other geoscience issues, NCAR has shown itself capable of rising to the challenge over the years and throughout FY2008.

The last section of the NCAR Annual Report covers the Community Climate System Model (CCSM), a climate model created by our science community’s best and brightest researchers. The first such model to be developed in a collaborative fashion, CCSM is energizing science by producing exciting new results in areas such as ice sheet and carbon cycle modeling, and regional hurricane simulation. The latest version, CCSM4, will soon be frozen in time for model runs to be generated for the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change. Also, the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model, the latest addition to the CCSM suite, allows modeling of Earth system interactions from the surface up to the upper atmosphere and into space. It’s an exciting time for CCSM, as its capabilities continue to expand and grow more robust.

I invite you to delve further into the NCAR Annual Report, as well as the Laboratory Annual Reports, to learn more about these and our many other FY2008 efforts.

Best wishes,

Eric Barron