Climate Models underfunded

Source: "CLIMATE SCIENCE: Turbulent Times for Climate Model," Eli Kintisch
Science 22 August 2008: Vol. 321. no. 5892, pp. 1032 - 1034

Researchers are running out of time to finish updating an important U.S. climate change model that has been hamstrung by the budget woes of its home institution, the National Center for Atmospheric Research

The article states:

Some climate scientists say that CCSM should have been better protected from the budget turmoil. "This hub of the nation's climate strategy has apparently not received the priority it deserves and needs," wrote members of the model's independent scientific advisory board on 8 July in an unsolicited letter to Eric Barron, who last month succeeded Killeen. Although computers are critical for climate simulation, they say, in the end it's NCAR's staff who must incorporate thousands of complex elements into a code that simulates everything from hurricanes to droughts to ocean currents.

Any erosion of CCSM's projected capabilities threatens what modeler David Randall of Colorado State University in Fort Collins calls "the closest thing we have to a national model." What sets CCSM apart from rival U.S. models at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is its widespread use by academic researchers, who also build it in partnership with NCAR. So whereas the other models rely on the expertise of teams of federal experts, CCSM's health reflects the state of overall U.S. climate research.

Comment: The Bush administration stalled for seven years (until leaving the heavy lifting on steps to reduce global warming) saying that there needed to be more scientific evidence to justify what they suggested would be heavy economic costs. (For the oil industry?)

Now I find out they have been underfunding a key area of research on climate change! JAD
Getting the picture. An early version of NCAR's updated global climate model (lower right) does a better job of simulating actual ocean temperatures during an El Niño event (top) than an earlier model (lower left).