As climate change has pushed climate patterns outside of
historic norms, the need for detailed projections is growing
across all sectors, including agriculture, insurance, and
emergency preparedness planning. A National Strategy for
Advancing Climate Modeling emphasizes the needs for climate
models to evolve substantially in order to deliver climate
projections at the scale and level of detail desired by decision
makers, this report finds. Despite much recent progress in
developing reliable climate models, there are still efficiencies
to be gained across the large and diverse U.S. climate modeling
community. Evolving to a more unified climate modeling
enterprise-in particular by developing a common software
infrastructure shared by all climate researchers and holding an
annual climate modeling forum-could help speed progress.
Throughout this report, several recommendations and guidelines
are outlined to accelerate progress in climate modeling. The
U.S. supports several climate models, each conceptually simila