MMM Strategic Plan: 2008 and beyond
Executive Summary
This Strategic Plan for MMM describes what the Division intends to accomplish during the next five years, together with the rationale for the choice of topics.
MMM conducts collaborative Earth-System Science Research aimed at:
- Advancing the knowledge of earth-system processes;
- Advancing the science of atmospheric prediction across all scales in response to societal needs;
- Development and refinement of advanced, state-of-the-science research and application tools (including models, instrumentation and data sets) and provision of these as a service to the community;
- Responding to major societal issues, needs and requirements.
MMM continues to be one of the foremost groups in the world conducting leading-edge research and development in Multi-scale Interactions, Dynamics and Prediction, Precipitation Processes, Atmospheric Chemistry and Biology, and Boundary Layers. This work couples into our applications work on Weather Prediction from hours to decades, Data Assimilation, and Atmospheric Chemistry and Biology. These, in turn, support development and maintenance of our facilities and services, which include the Advanced Research WRF (WRF) Model, Data Assimilation, the Nested Regional Climate Model and the new program to develop a Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS). There is demonstrable benefit in the 2-way flow of ideas and developments between these three areas; all areas involve comprehensive collaborations within and outside NCAR and contribute to our world-class science and publications output.
MMM contributes to the fabric of NCAR by maintaining the highest level of academic excellence and integrity; through its involvement with the academic community, including a popular visitor program, support for students, lectures at universities, and high level of collaboration and joint publication; by maintaining and developing the WRF modeling system including support for community developed modules, a help desk, and tutorials and workshops; through our commitment to diversity and mentoring young scientists; and through our strong and expanding contacts with society that enable us to respond to and support major societal needs and to inform and educate appropriate sectors.
Our activities are spread across into two Priority Programs:
- Prediction Across Scales
- Goal: To develop advanced predictive techniques that improve the capacity of society to respond to, adapt to, and mitigate the effects of high-impact weather and climate on scales from hours to decades with special focus on advanced community modeling facilities.
- Advancing Earth-System Knowledge
- Goal: In collaboration with our academic, government, and industry colleagues undertake leading-edge research aimed at the advancement of Earth-system knowledge, with emphasis on areas in support of overall NCAR goals and programs and especially our Prediction Across Scales Priority Program.
These Program Imperatives are highly coupled and interactive, with each depending on, and benefiting from the other. Specific action items and frontier plans within these broad Imperatives are evolutionary in nature, taking account of major societal needs, our expertise, external collaborations, available infrastructure, and drivers such as community-wide programs. We recognize that additional expertise and support staff will be needed to fully implement our plans and we shall be seeking to develop this expertise and support as a priority. This will be done through a combination targeted hires and expansion of our current collaborations with other ESSL and NCAR divisions and laboratories, the university community, government laboratories, and international organizations.
Our major Imperative and Frontier programs are listed below, together with relevant Action Items. These are numbered for convenience of reference and neither the numbering nor the order of appearance should be taken as indicative of relative priority.
PDF version of the complete MMM Science Plan