The "Community Modeling" concept has been embraced by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) as a means to facilitate the development, maintenance, and use of large-scope models of the complex earth system. Models of the earth's climate and weather systems, for example, have become increasingly sophisticated and require access to very high-end, expensive computational resources. It is arguably more efficient to have fewer models with more scientists involved than a plethora of individual models with fewer scientists critically examining each model's formulation and results. The Community Climate System Model (CCSM) is a good example of a well-developed community model and represents a high priority activity at NCAR. The latest version of this code (CCSM-3) has been exercised as one of the U.S. contributions to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). This model has been developed by many tens of collaborating scientists across many institutions and contains sophisticated descriptions of the coupled atmosphere, ocean, sea ice, ecosystem dynamics, and biogeochemical cycles. CCSM-3 can be run to simulate past or future climates under a series of different socio-economic and physical scenarios. It is based on modern software engineering precepts and has been ported to many different computational platforms, including the Japanese Earth Simulator. A second example of a large NCAR-supported community model is the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model. WRF is a high-resolution, cloud-resolving code that has been developed by a broad community of developers for research and operational purposes. WRF is scheduled to become operational for NOAA and the DoD. This talk will describe both the process leading to the development of these community models as well as scientific highlights from the models themselves.

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