The US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science will make available more than 10 million hours of computing time for the US Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to explore advanced climate change models at three of DOE’s national laboratories as part of a three-year memorandum of understanding on collaborative climate research signed today by the two agencies.
NOAA will work with climate change models as well as perform near real-time high-impact (non-production) weather prediction research using computing time on DOE Office of Science resources including two of the world’s top five most powerful computers – the Argonne National Laboratory’s 557 TF IBM Blue Gene/P and Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s 263 TF Cray XT4. NOAA researchers will also receive time on DOE’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Advanced, high-resolution climate models from NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) will be prototyped and compared to other models like the NSF-DOE sponsored Community Climate System Model. This partnership is also consistent with the goals of the US Climate Change Science Program, which is responsible for facilitating the creation and application of knowledge of Earth’s global environment through research, observations, decision support, and communication. NOAA and DOE scientists play key roles in national and international assessments, for example, the Nobel Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Under the agreement, the Office of Science and NOAA will work together to improve the quality of and quantify the uncertainty of climate and weather prediction, including improving the prediction of high-impact weather events to provide the best science-based climate and weather information for management and policy decisions.