NCAR: The NCAR Annual Report (NAR) NCAR Home NAR Home Search The NCAR Annual Report > Home NCAR Annual Report Director's Message The NCAR Annual Report Science & Facility Plans For NSF The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is a federally funded research Past Annual Scientific and development center. Together with our partners at universities and research Reports centers, we are dedicated to exploring and understanding our atmosphere and its interactions with the Sun, the oceans, the biosphere, and human society. Center Program This document is the NCAR’s science and facility plan for fiscal years 2006/07 and NCAR Science accomplishments for fiscal years 2005/06 and responds to guidance from the Transferring Knowledge & Technology National Science Foundation’s Division of Atmospheric Sciences (ATM). Workforce, Education & Outreach The program plan and the NCAR programs it describes were developed and thoroughly reviewed at NCAR. Priorities and programmatic emphases have been Cyberinfrastructure established in accordance with published NSF criteria. In addition, NCAR’s annual Observing Systems program planning and implementation occurs in the framework of a long-range Metrics strategic plan prepared with community and Foundation involvement. Education & Outreach NCAR’s Science and Facility Plans and Accomplishments Awards Community Service Publications People Staffing Organizational Chart Staff List ©2005 UCAR | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Visit Us | Sponsored by http://www.nar.ucar.edu/2005/index.jsp[7/6/2015 12:57:17 PM] NCAR: The NCAR Annual Report (NAR) NCAR Home NAR Home Search The NCAR Annual Report > Home > Director's Message NCAR Annual Report Director's Message NCAR Annual Report Science & Facility Plans Director's Message For NSF Dear Colleagues: Past Annual Scientific Reports I am very pleased to introduce the new web-based 2006 Center Program NCAR Annual Report for the National Center for Atmospheric Research. This report is a merging of NCAR’s NCAR Science annual Program Plan that describes NCAR’s planned Transferring Knowledge & activities for the next two years and the Annual Scientific Technology Report that reports on NCAR’s recent accomplishments. Workforce, Education & Instead of reporting by organizational unit as we did in the Outreach past, the new report is arranged in accordance with our Cyberinfrastructure strategic planning efforts and provides a closer mapping Observing Systems between our goals and priorities and respective plans and Metrics accomplishments. Other changes include an emphasis on higher-level summary descriptions of our activities that is Education & Outreach intended to reach a wider audience. Program details are Awards available through weblinks and I encourage you to use the Community Service report’s search function to find your particular area of Publications interest. Here are a few of our report’s highlights: People In March 2005, the HIAPER(High performance Instrumented Airborne Platform for Staffing Environmental Research) aircraft arrived at its new hangar at Jeffco airport after Organizational Chart more than two decades of planning. HIAPER, also known as the Gulfstream 5, or Staff List GV, has just completed a series of progressive science missions to test an initial set of community instruments installed on the aircraft. Community researchers are also developing additional instrumentation funded by NSF’s $12.5 million proposal opportunity. NCAR continues plans to meet the scientific community’s growing computational needs. The Computing and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) entered FY 2005 with 12.1 teraflops of total computational capacity at NCAR and ended the year with a capacity increase to 21.2 teraflops. In August 2005, CISL took delivery of a new IBM p5-575 supercomputer named "bluevista", supplementing our existing bluesky supercomputer. Bluevista will be made available to general users in January 2006, roughly doubling the supercomputing capacity provided by NCAR from 400 to almost 800 gigaflops. A typical application is expected to run twice as fast on bluevista as it currently does on bluesky. In the next year, NCAR will work with community partners to develop an integrated science, facility, and funding plan to expand NCAR’s supercomputing facility capabilities. The goal is to create a new supercomputing facility that can support the technological developments projected over the next several decades; expand the investment in new supercomputing systems at they become available, and engage the broad geosciences community to utilize and support this initiative. A major new accomplishment in our climate analysis research is the completion of the simulations in support of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, AR4. Over 200 scientific papers have been written or are in process based on available IPCC data sets, including the comprehensive runs of http://www.nar.ucar.edu/2005/dir.jsp[7/6/2015 12:57:19 PM] NCAR: The NCAR Annual Report (NAR) the Community Climate System Model (CCSM), version 3, managed by NCAR on behalf of the research community. The IPCC AR4 is due to be published in 2007 with NCAR scientists playing a leading role. The Earth System Grid (ESG) is now providing simple, Web portal access to over 70 terabytes of climate simulation data, including the data repository for Working Group 1 of the IPCC AR4. More than 1,400 users have accessed model simulations within these records. The Earth System Modeling Framework(ESMF), developed and maintained by NCAR and its partners, has become the standard software framework for international environmental modeling. NCAR scientists are currently collaborating on nesting the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF), a weather model, into the CCSM and Community Atmosphere Model (CAM) climate models to simulate more complex, multiscale interactions. Planned activities will also focus on aspects of tropical variability which are poorly simulated in the current CCSM and CAM . Other weather modeling efforts at NCAR also played a critical role in tracking this year’s catastrophic Hurricane Katrina. The results of NCAR's Advanced Research version of the WRF have been impressive, with track and intensity forecasts demonstrating high accuracy. The focus in FY 2006 and FY 2007 will be on the modeling of internal dynamics of tropical cyclones and hurricanes and on developing WRF enhancements to improve its accuracy and efficacy. Education and outreach efforts continue to grow at NCAR and special funds will be committed toward this effort. In this past year, our first Faculty Fellowshipprogram provided extended visits for 3 university faculty and their graduate students. During NCAR’s fourth annual Undergraduate Leadership Workshop, 21 undergraduates in the geosciences spent a week at NCAR this summer to learn more about career and resource opportunities. These are just initial steps and we plan to grow and strengthen these and similar programs. Our 2005 Postdoctoral recruitment brought 140 highly qualified candidates for the nine positions available. We also just completed our 2005 Scientist Irecruitment with a total of six positions hired, including a research engineer to work with HIAPER. Other research emphases will be in multiscale modeling, biogeosciences, the water cycle, and math. At the management level, we have been involved in extensive strategic planning activities in this last year. These planning activities, which resulted in the goals and priorities you will read about in this report, were facilitated by the new management structure we instituted in early FY 2005. The new structure incorporates a broadly representative Executive Committee, five laboratories, and several new cross-cutting institutes to complement the familiar research divisions and programs. The newest group, created this past spring, is the Center for Capacity Building (CCB)which will focus on human and institutional capacity building related to climate-society- environment interactions. I hope you visit this Web report to learn more about NCAR's contributions and plans to areas of your research interests as well as other aspects of our program. Tim Killeen NCAR Director ©2005 UCAR | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Visit Us | Sponsored by http://www.nar.ucar.edu/2005/dir.jsp[7/6/2015 12:57:19 PM] NCAR: The NCAR Annual Report (NAR) NCAR Home NAR Home Search The NCAR Annual Report > Home > Science & Facility Plans and Accomplishments NCAR Annual Report Director's Message NCAR Annual Report Science & Facility Plans Science & Facility Plans and Accomplishments For NSF Each year, the NCAR Executive Committee conducts an Annual Budget Review (ABR) Past Annual Scientific process, where we formally review our scientific, service, and education portfolios Reports and budgets for the next two years, in the light of changing requirements and Center Program needs. The ABR is where NCAR management considers and occasionally adjusts the relative balance among NCAR’s major program elements. It is also the means by NCAR Science which NCAR gathers the information provided to NSF in our Annual program plans. Transferring Knowledge & Technology The following plans for fiscal years 2006 and 2007, along with their Workforce, Education & accomplishments for FY 2005 and FY 2006 are organized by NCAR’s goals and Outreach priorities as described in NCAR’s Strategic Plan. Cyberinfrastructure Observing Systems NCAR Science: Investigate, predict, and explain the Earth-sun system Transferring Knowledge and