A personal perspective on modelling the climate system.
Given their increasing relevance for society, I suggest that the climate science community itself does not treat the development of error-freeab initiomodels of the climate system with sufficient urgency. With increasing levels of difficulty, I discuss a number of proposals for speeding up such development. Firstly, I believe that climate science should make better use of the pool of post-PhD talent in mathematics and physics, for developing next-generation climate models. Secondly, I believe there is more scope for the development of modelling systems which link weather and climate prediction more seamlessly. Finally, here in Europe, I call for a new European Programme on Extreme Computing and Climate to advance our ability to simulate climate extremes, and understand the drivers of such extremes. A key goal for such a programme is the development of a 1 km global climate system model to run on the first exascale supercomputers in the early 2020s.
Department of Physics , University of Oxford , Oxford, UK.
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Palmer
International Bureau of Meteorology; climate prediction; cloud-resolved modelling; seamless prediction; systematic error