Our understanding of the Earth's climate system is advancing rapidly. Improved instrumentation on the ground and in space let us observe many aspects of the global system in real time, while advanced physical models serve as platforms to test hypotheses about the important driving mechanisms. Over the past decades, we have recognized that the complex interactions between the atmosphere, oceans, sea-ice and land surface are a continuous source for variability of climate at all time scales. Superposed on these so-called internal variations come external influences both natural and - increasingly so - human-induced factors that can modulate the system. The natural factors include explosive eruptions of volcanoes, variations in the sun's activity, or changes in the Earth's orbit around the sun. Human impacts on the system arise from changes to the composition of the atmosphere through large emissions of greenhouse gases and particles, and modification of the land surface through land use. The combination of these factors needs to be considered if we want to understand how and why climate has been varying in the past, and how it will change in the future.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research - Community Climate System Model (NCAR-CCSM3) is a latest generation global, coupled atmosphere-ocean climate system model that represents the physical aspects of the Earth's climate system. It includes natural and externally induced variability in all important components of the climate system. Run at 15 minute time steps, the NCAR-CCSM3 can reproduce the main features of recent climate through realistic integration of climate variability from daily to millennial time scales. The model can be used to study the effects of potential future changes in greenhouse conditions and help understand how individual regions are going to be affected in terms of temperature or hydrologic changes, such as droughts or other extreme events. The same model can also be applied to study climates of the past. It has been used to simulate the climate of the last 1000 years, or previous drastic cold (the Last Glacial Maximum some 21,000 years ago) or warm periods (the Late Permian, ~250 Million years ago, a time just prior to the largest mass extinction on Earth). The model has now proven to be a good partner to traditional field-based geological research.

Among the handful of complex climate models, the NCAR-CCSM is unique in that it is developed by a wide community of climate scientists, mostly from the US, but also from all over the world. The model is freely available (http://www.ccsm.ucar.edu) and can be run on a large number of different computer platforms. Depending on the specified resolutions, it can be run on a single workstation or on the largest supercomputers. The current production version performs roughly 3 trillion floating point calculations to simulate a single day. The effort is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.

To fulfill the mission of serving the computational, data management, and research needs of the atmospheric and related earth science communities, the NCAR Computational and Information System Laboratory provides stable services utilizing proven technologies in high performance computing, data analysis, and data archival, and at the same time pursues promising new technologies designed to allow scientists to address challenging scientific problems. This presentation will describe the cyberinfrastructure environment supported at NCAR, outline the challenges that exist in maintaining and enhancing this environment, and discuss the short-term plans and long-term options for augmentation of the computational and related facilities.

Python is an open source, interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language, often compared with Perl, Tcl, and Java. It is becoming the programming language of choice for many scientific users globally.

PyNGL and PyNIO are Python interfaces to a widely popular software package called the NCAR Command Language (NCL), a scripting language developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) for the access, analysis, and high-quality quantitative visualization of geoscientific data.

NCL has had a significant impact on scientific research worldwide. This presentation will briefly discuss NCL's history, and then segue into why Python was chosen for developing the next generation framework tools for analysis and visualization. The remaining focus will be on PyNGL and PyNIO, including recent and future improvements.

Of particular interest is the recent addition in PyNIO of support for the GRIB 2 data format, a second-generation data format standard developed by the World Meteorological Organization for distributing gridded data. The National Weather Service is one site that has adopted this format, along with the THORPEX Interactive Grand Global Ensemble (TIGGE). THORPEX is a key component of a world weather research program to accelerate the improvements in the accuracy of one-day to two-week high-impact weather forecasts to achieve social, economic, and environmental benefits.

Research in the Earth System sciences is increasingly a realm of multidisciplinary international collaboration. Around the globe, supercomputers continuously generate terabytes of weather, climate, and other environmental simulation data that must be analyzed and compared to a burgeoning volume of observed information. Often, distributed scientific teams need to look across broad “slices” of information. This poses a new set of challenges that spans the integration of modeling, data management, analysis and visualization, distributed systems, petascale data volumes, growing data complexity, and ultimately knowledge. Our information technology must evolve to serve these new scientific demands.

In this presentation we will discuss a suite of complimentary science and technology efforts that NCAR is involved in. In the area of weather, we are working with the World Meterological Organization (WMO) to build the new WMO Information System (WIS) and the TIGGE (THORPEX Interactive Grand Global Ensemble) near-real-time terascale data system. The newly funded DOE SciDAC2 Earth System Grid Center for Enabling Technologies will create powerful new distributed systems for enabling global climate change research. The NSF-sponsored Earth System Curator project is working to bridge the gap between model component frameworks and scientific data, while the Virtual Solar Terrestrial Observatory (VSTO) is exploring new pathways for leveraging semantic information for research. As a new TeraGrid site, NCAR will join in collaboration with our partners to advance our national cyberinfrastructure in support of these activities and many others.

These frontier efforts serve as opportunities to define and develop common technology foundations that will facilitate realizing our vision of an Earth System Knowledge Environment.