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GCN Home > April 16, 2001 issue

Scientists call for a climate research agency

BY PATRICIA DAUKANTAS | GCN STAFF

A panel of climate scientists has called for a new federal agency to advise policy-makers on climate research and projections.

The Climate Service they envision would be organized differently from other government research programs, said Richard B. Rood, a senior scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Data Assimilation Office in Greenbelt, Md. It would employ about 150 scientists and software engineers and have a $50 million annual budget, he said.


NASA scientist Richard Rood envisions a Climate Service with a $50 million budget to advise the government on climate research.
No existing agency has the range of resources needed to solve large problems in climate change, so the government needs a multiagency, product-driven approach to get the right mix of operations and science, Rood said.

The panel’s December 2000 report also said U.S. scientists are hampered by a lack of the shared-memory vector supercomputers now made in Japan. Some scientists believe vector systems perform more efficiently than the distributed-memory, parallel computers and clusters favored in U.S. laboratories.

The vector advocates scored a victory in late February when U.S. manufacturer Cray Inc. of Seattle announced it will resell SX-5 vector systems from NEC Corp. of Japan.

Rood’s panel consisted of five government climate scientists and one consultant in organizational behavior. The Office of Science and Technology Policy and the interagency U.S. Global Change Research Program commissioned the panel in January 2000.

The term product-driven research describes what usually is called applied research, Rood said. In discovery-driven research, individual scientists or small groups seek funding from outside agencies and publish peer-reviewed findings. Applied or product-driven research, in contrast, aligns research with timely delivery of technical reports requested by policy-makers.

European cousin

The organization most similar to the one proposed is the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, England, a consortium backed by 21 countries. It produces operational forecasts and conducts research in new numerical forecast methods. Rood said the center has a more executive-oriented style of management than its U.S. counterparts.

The panel left open the question of whether a Climate Service should be an independent agency like NASA and the National Science Foundation or come under the aegis of a cabinet department. Simply reorganizing current projects into a new agency without rethinking the underlying management structure would not work, Rood said.



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