PNNL

Abstract

In the summer of 2000, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) funded a project to perform an experimental “end-to-end” assessment of the effects of climate change on the western United States. The project was intended both to demonstrate and test a methodology for performing quantitative assessments of climate-driven environmental impacts. A second objective was to provide useful information to regional, state, and local decision-makers, whose job it will be to deal with the conflicting demands that climate change, population increases, and economic growth will place on the water resources of the West. The third objective was to demonstrate the potential value of an Accelerated Climate Prediction Initiative (ACPI). The ACPI was a DOE initiative to accelerate the development, improvement, and application of U.S. climate models and to provide the advanced computational facilities that would be needed to carry out this work. Although the ACPI was not funded, some of its spirit lives on in various DOE and other federal agency projects and programs designed to advance “ultra-scale” computing and the science of climate simulation. In this volume, we hope to demonstrate what can be achieved if a highly qualified group of scientists are brought together, under relatively light management reins, to take an in-depth look at how future climate change might affect issues of real importance to the citizens of the United States.