Personal Impressions from the Workshop

1
Personal Impressions from the Workshop

• Rick Anthes
• University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
• 5 December 2002

2

• The Draft Plan, the Workshop and the Process
• Very good turnout and participation
• Intense interest in this topic
• High-level administration and international
  participation
• Indicates willingness to participate in the
  process
• Process open and transparent
• Could have had more industry participation
• Well organized and well run workshop
• Congratulations to Jim Mahoney, his staff, and
  many who
• contributed to draft plan!

3

• The Draft Plan, the Workshop and the Process
• Excellent start on an overview document
• Very difficult and complex problem
• Based on good science-much from USGCRP
• Stated fairly
• But not a strategic planshort on details
• Many good suggestions for improvement
• Probably need to complete the overview,
  supporting
• document and then write shorter, more specific
• implementation plan.

4
Some common themes

• Need much more computer power
• High resolution-scale interactions
• Ensemble runs
• Coupled models-physical, chemical, biological
• Data assimilation, reanalysis
• Could justify 1 million times the present
  computing power, world wide!
• Human resources
• Global climate Observing system

5
Some common themes

• Importance international cooperation
• Observations
• Models
• Output
• People
• Strategies
• Regional, regional, regional.
• Resources are limiting the rate of progress
• Computers
• Observations
• Brainpower (human resources)
• Time

6
Water

• Water quite possibly the most important theme
• Difficult to predict/simulate on any time scale
• Critically important to all nations and culture

7
Climate and Weather

• Climate is what you expect, weather is what you
  get!
• Continuum of temporal and spatial scales
• Weather
• Interannual variability
• Decadal and beyond
• Are there any gaps in the spectrum?

8
Partnerships

• Government (federal, state, city)
• Academia
• Industry
• Media
• International

9
Social issues

• Population
• Overall growth
• Demographic shifts
• Growing demand (demand growing much faster than
  climate change!)
• Equity
• Conflicts of various kinds
• Increasing societal vulnerability to weather and
  climate