The MIT Center for Collective Intelligence is organizing a workshop at this year’s Conference on Computational Sustainability entitled “Modularity and Integration of Climate Models.” Check out the Agenda.
Traditionally, computational models designed to simulate climate change and its associated impacts (climate science models, integrated assessment models, and climate economics models) have been developed as standalone entities. This limits possibilities for collaboration between independent researchers focused on sub-?problems, and is a barrier to more rapid advances in climate modeling science because work is not distributed effectively across the community. The architecture of these models also precludes running a model with modular sub -? components located on different physical hardware across a network.
In this workshop, we hope to examine the possibility for widespread development of climate model components that may be developed independently and coupled together at runtime in a “plug and play” fashion. Work on climate models and modeling frameworks that are more modular has begun, (e.g. Kim, et al., 2006) and substantial progress has been made in creating open data standards for climate science models, but many challenges remain.
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A goal of this workshop is to characterize issues like these more precisely, and to brainstorm about approaches to addressing them. Another desirable outcome of this workshop is the creation of an informal working group that is interested in promoting more modular climate model development.