Abstract

Global coupled Earth System models are vital tools for understanding potential future changes in our climate. As we move towards mid-decade, we will see new model realizations with higher grid resolution and the integration of many additional complex processes. The US Department of Energy (DOE) is supporting an advanced climate simulation program that is aimed at accelerating the execution of climate models one hundred-fold by 2005 relative to the execution rate of today.
This program, and other similar modeling and observational programs, are producing terabytes of data today and will produce petabytes in the future. This tremendous volume of data has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of our global Earth System. In order for this potential to be realized, geographically distributed teams of researchers must be able to effectively and rapidly develop new knowledge from these massive, distributed data holdings and share the results with a broad community of other researchers, assessment groups, policy makers, and educators.

Date

March 13, 2026

Authors

Ian Foster, Ethan Alpert, Ann Chervenak, Bob Drach, Carl Kesselman, Veronika Nefedova, Don Middleton, Arie Shoshani, Alex Sim, Dean Williams