Community Modeling Systems: Rick Anthes' Greatest Legacy (Invited Presentation)

Although Rick Anthes has made wide ranging contributions to the atmospheric sciences, in domains including tropical meteorology, hurricane and mesoscale modeling, and satellite-based observation systems, to name only a few, I would suggest his most important and enduring legacy is the fostering of community modeling in the atmospheric community and, by example, others. In fact, the profound impacts of this innovation are difficult to exaggerate.

A journey back to the 1970s, reveals a pre-modern world of mainframe computers and atmospheric models that were either self-developed or exchanged between cooperating colleagues. This situation created a substantial barrier to innovation and experimentation since each researcher was essentially starting from scratch or nearly so. Numerical models were not general tools that a community of scientists could perfect together. Rather, they were custom vehicles, constructed for individual exploration.

Rick changed all this and the entire paradigm of cooperative effort in our discipline. And in doing so, he revolutionized atmospheric sciences, leading to an increase in productivity and capability unimagined only a decade earlier.

During the 1960’s and 1970’s, Rick developed a hurricane model of increasing sophistication, and after moving to Penn. State University, worked with colleagues to develop a more general mesoscale model with enhanced capabilities (MM0 to MM3). Moving to NCAR, Rick brought a highly capable graduate student with him (Bill Kuo), who, working under Rick’s guidance and with the aid of others in Boulder and Penn. State, developed MM4, a well-documented, general mesoscale model.

As director of NCAR’s Analysis and Atmospheric Prediction Division, Rick made the fateful decision to make MM4 a community model, freely available to anyone who wished to use it. And he provided the support for MM4 to grow into a far more powerful MM5, with expanded physics and data assimilation options. He went further contributing financial resources for community support, a critical element for new users.

MM5, with Rick’s support and the leadership of Bill Kuo, grew into the most important modeling tool of mesoscale and synoptic meteorologists around the world. The availability of increasingly powerful workstations, upon which MM5 could run, helped provide the computer resources that fostered a modeling revolution in the community. The user community expanded rapidly into the thousands and having large numbers of researchers working with the same modeling platform resulted in rapid improvement of the modeling system, including the development of a diverse suite of physics and other options. Atmospheric modeling because an essential tool of both synoptic and mesoscale meteorology, which previously had been mainly observation-based subdisciplines.

MM5’s success led to the development of WRF, which in turn has led to MPAS—an unbroken chain of innovation and improvement for which there is no end in sight. A chain of modeling tools that has provided the foundation for modern mesoscale and synoptic meteorology.

This talk will end with some personal comments, noting have the development of MM5 and its descendants has profoundly changed and enhanced my own career.