Integrating the Community into the Development, Use, and Support of the Community Earth System Model (CESM) (Invited Presentation)

The Community Earth System Model (CESM) is a collaborative, community modeling effort between researchers at the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), universities, and other national and international research institutions. CESM is used for multiple purposes, including investigations of past and current climate, projections of future climate change, and subseasonal-to-decadal Earth system predictions. To keep CESM at the leading edge of climate and Earth system modeling and related science requires continuous developments, improvements, testing, and subsequent applications of the model to various problems. As the scope of the CESM project becomes increasingly expansive and complex to encompass a hierarchy of scales, machine learning, and complex extremely large data set analysis, the scale of the effort to meet the CESM research community needs is beyond the capacity of NSF NCAR to complete on its own. Consequently, the CESM Project involves contributions from scientists and software engineers at all career levels from many national and international institutions. Here, we will review the successes and limitations of the governance structure for CESM and ongoing efforts to engage the broader research community in the development, use, and support of the CESM. In particular, we will review community contributions to the forthcoming 3rd version of CESM, CESM3.