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The Climate Prediction
Project
Global Climate Information for
Regional Adaptation and
Decision-Making in the 21st
Century
Challenge
The world recognizes that the threat of global climate
change is one of the most important problems facing
humanity. To cope with the consequences of climate
change, the peoples, governments, and economies of
the world must develop mitigation and adaptation
strategies, which will require investments of trillions of
dollars. The development of science-based adaptation
and mitigation strategies will only be possible through a
revolution in regional climate predictions.
The Summit
The World Modeling Summit for Climate
Prediction was organized to develop a
strategy to revolutionize prediction of the
climate through the 21st century to help
address the threat of global climate
change.
Summit Declaration
1. Improved prediction of the changes in the
statistics of regional climate, especially of
extreme events and high-impact weather, are
required to assess the impacts of climate
change and variations, and to develop
adaptive strategies to ameliorate their effects
on water resources, food security, energy,
transport, coastal integrity, environment and
health.
Summit Declaration
2. Our current inadequacy in the provision of
robust estimates of the risk to society,
particularly from possible catastrophic
changes in regional climate, is strongly
influenced by limitations in computer power
and the size of the scientific workforce.
Summit Declaration
3. Climate prediction is among the most computationally
demanding problems in science. It is both necessary
and possible to revolutionize climate prediction:
necessary because of the grand challenge posed by
the changing climate, and possible building on the
past accomplishments of prediction of weather and
climate. However, the scientific expertise and the
computing capability is not available in any single
nation, and a comprehensive international effort is
essential. Investing today in climate science will lead
to significantly reduced costs of coping with climate
change tomorrow.
Summit Declaration
4. A Climate Prediction Project coordinated by
WCRP, in collaboration with WWRP and the
IGBP and involving the national weather and
climate centers should be initiated to provide
global climate information for regional
adaptation and decision-making in the 21st
century.
Summit Declaration
5. As a part of the Climate Prediction Project, and in
addition to enhancing the capacity of the world’s
existing national climate research centers, a World
Climate Research Facility (WCRF) for climate
prediction should be established that will enable the
national centers to accelerate progress in improving
operational climate prediction at decadal to multidecadal lead times, enhancing understanding of the
climate system, building global capacity, developing a
trained scientific workforce, and engaging the global
user community. The WCRF will argue for sustained,
long-term, global observations that are needed to
initialize, constrain and verify the models. An
important component of the WCRF will be an archive
of observations and model data with appropriate user
interface and knowledge-discovery tools for
diagnostic tests.
Summit Declaration
6. The central component of the WCRF will be one or more dedicated high-end
computing facilities that will enable the revolution in climate prediction by
supporting the model resolution and complexity required for the most advanced
and reliable representations of the climate system that technology and our
scientific understanding of the problem can deliver. This computing capability,
with systems at least 10,000 times more powerful than the currently available
computers, is vital for regional climate predictions to underpin mitigation policies
and local and regional adaptation needs with robust estimates of risk. The
computing capability will help advance our understanding of the processes
responsible for climate variability and predictability, and provide a quantum leap
in the exploration of the limits in our ability to reliably predict climate with a level
of detail and complexity that is not possible at the national centers. It will also
make it possible to bring to bear the latest and most innovative computer
technology on the climate change problem, and provide a common modeling
framework through an international computing laboratory and make it possible to
conduct specialized experiments to advise decision-making in adaptation,
mitigation. This project will permit scientists to strive towards kilometer-scale
modeling of the global climate system, which will particularly benefit the
simulation and prediction of tropical climate, helping many of the world’s
developing countries that are especially vulnerable to climate change.
Summit Declaration
7. The WCRF will make it possible for the first time to
deliver climate predictions with a reliable estimate of
their uncertainty. To estimate the quality of a climate
prediction requires an assessment of how accurately
we know the current phase of natural climate
variability, on which anthropogenic climate change is
superimposed. But also the WCRF will enable the
climate research community to assess how model
uncertainties limit the skill of climate predictions. All
elements of estimating the uncertainty in climate
predictions pose an extreme burden on computing
resources but also on the availability of observational
data.
Summit Declaration
8. The methodology of initializing weather and
short-term climate prediction models with
observations must be seamlessly extended to
predictions of decadal variations and climate
change. The understanding and
representation of physical and
biogeochemical processes and feedbacks
must be improved to make reliable centennial
projections.
Summit Declaration
9. It may be possible that the WCRF will be
funded in different ways, e.g., through publicprivate partnerships with corporate and
foundation resources and through
governmental treaties and agreements.
Summit Declaration
The Climate Prediction Project has the
potential to help humanity cope with the
consequences of climate change.
The lasting legacy of the Project will be to
help the citizens of the world in the 21st
century.