HPCwire: The Future of Climate Research: A Q&A with ORNL's James Hack

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November 07, 2008

The Future of Climate Research: A Q&A with ORNL's James Hack

by Leo Williams (NCCS Science Writer), for HPCwire

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When James Hack came to Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) at the end of 2007, he was given two hats: one as the director of ORNL's National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) and the other as leader of ORNL's laboratory-wide climate science effort.

At the helm of the NCCS, he guides the most powerful open science supercomputing center in the world. The NCCS hosts leading research in climate dynamics and the development of alternative energy sources, as well as a wide range of computational sciences -- from basic explorations in nuclear physics and quantum dynamics to astrophysics explorations of supernovas and dark matter.

As leader of ORNL's Climate Change Initiative, he is in charge of pulling together scientists and engineers from across ORNL to advance the state of the science. Hack is uniquely qualified to take on this role. Before coming to ORNL, he headed the Climate Modeling Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., and served as deputy director of the center's Climate and Global Dynamics Division.

We asked Hack about the future of climate science and the climate initiative at ORNL.

HPCwire: How will climate research evolve in the coming years?

Hack: Climate science has largely been curiosity-driven research. But the growing acceptance that humans affect the evolution of atmospheric composition, land use, and so on, all of which in turn affect the climate state, provides a little more focus and a little more urgency to taking a harder look at what the modeling tools are capable of providing in the form of specific consequences for society.

That to me is the transformation. There's a growing need for improvements in simulation fidelity and predictive skill. The potential consumers of that kind of simulation information will be leaning hard on the climate change community to provide answers to their questions. That's the change that's going to differentiate the next 10 years of climate change science from the previous 30.

For example, we know from observations over the last 50 years that the snowpack in the Pacific Northwest has been decreasing. At the same time, temperature in the same region has been increasing. If that trend continues, it raises lots of concerns for water resource managers who have counted on storing their water in the form of snow until a certain time of year when it starts melting.

If precipitation never comes down as snow or if it starts melting sooner than you need it, you may not able to meet your water demands. It's an example of an infrastructure that's vulnerable to specific changes in a region's climate state. Many of the solutions to this problem may also bring with them other environmental consequences.

HPCwire: So what can you do to help users of climate data?

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