A Brief History of Modeling Ocean and Ice in Climate at NCAR 1975–2009, and Future Prospects

The speaker has been associated with Warren Washington for almost 35 years, including while an NCAR employee for 10 years and an NCAR Affiliate Scientist from the Postgraduate School for about 18 years. During that time, he has helped with the implementation of thermodynamic and dynamic ice models in coupled climate models developed under Warren, and he has played a role in providing versions of the Bryan and Cox ocean model for progressively more advanced computational architectures, such as vector, vector-parallel, and massively parallel machines, to use in climate modeling. The Postgraduate School modeling group was one of the three key partners in the design of the highly successful Parallel Climate Model under Warren's leadership. That group has also collaboratively pursued high-resolution ocean and ice modeling for both the Global Ocean and the Arctic Ocean, which will help show the way forward for modeling ocean and ice in future climate simulations, running on the most advanced petascale computers anticipated by 2012. This talk summarizes these developments over several decades that have led to the present advanced state of climate modeling that has been achieved during the remarkable career of Warren Washington.