“Computational experiments at the frontiers of our technological capabilities will require unprecedented community planning and coordination, essentially changing the way in which climate science progresses”.
This is the summary of the article published as cover story in “Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society” (Volume 91, Issue 3 – March 2010) and written by A. Navarra (President of CMCC), J. L. Kinter III (COLA) and J. Tribbia (NCAR)

Abstract from BAMS
This article discusses the interplay between computational experiments and scientific advancement in dynamical meteorology and climate dynamics. In doing so, the emphasis is on the dual role of computations in prediction and experimentation, permitting the development of physical insight and confidence in the mechanistic insight through verification. Modern climate dynamics has steadily evolved because of the ready access to computational power that has developed over the past quarter century.

The landscape for state-of-the-art computational climate science is changing rapidly, however, with the drive toward greater complexity in climate models in order to more fully represent the interactions among components, the need for higher-resolution atmospheric and oceanic models to fully capture critical aspects of the variability in these components, and the advent of petascale and (eventually) exascale computing facilities. Finally, the manner in which the combination of these changes will likely alter the planning and execution of grand-challenge computational experiments and what this might mean in terms of collaborative climate science is discussed.

Related content

• the web site of Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society;
• in TEC: Decadal Prediction. Can It Be Skillful?  an article written by twenty scientist, among them Antonio Navarra (CMCC) and published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society;
• the web site of the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies (COLA) in Calverton, Maryland;
• the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado;
• from BAMS web site, the full version of the article Cricial Experiments in Climate Science (pdf)