Program was a CHAMMP at uniting climate models, powerful computers

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The atmosphere and ocean modeling teams later worked with Warren Washington’s NCAR group to couple these components into the DOE Parallel Climate Model.

It was the first time atmospheric and oceanic models were coupled in a massively parallel computing environment, Bader says.

Change in the air

CHAMMP was so successful, it may have put itself out of business.  Bader says it had met its objectives after six or seven years.

“We had tried out new computer architectures, had developed a state-of-the-art coupled climate model to use those architectures and be portable between them, and Warren Washington had taken those and applied it to climate research,” he adds.  DOE’s Climate Change Prediction Program absorbed CHAMMP.

Nonetheless, CHAMMP was a vital part of the joint DOE-National Science Foundation effort to build an effective climate model, Bader says: “It’s a part of some of the blocks of the foundation for the CCSM.”

With the ability to run on massively parallel computers, the CCSM is a leading general circulation climate model.  The code is available to anyone, enabling climate research around the world.

ASCR and Biological and Environmental Research still support numerical aspects of model development, including scaling them to run on today’s huge parallel computers.  The latest versions use the Model Coupling Toolkit, developed at Argonne, to build the parallel CCSM from individual ocean, ice and land models.

The Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program, sponsored by DOE’s Office of Science, supports work to revamp the CCSM so it more accurately couples greenhouse gas emissions and other factors.

Those improvements, and improvements in other models, make climate predictions more accurate than ever, Bader says.  Because of that, “the human effect on climate has been documented so that it’s almost irrefutable.”

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