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dirtbag
climber
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Oct 23, 2012 - 10:04pm PT
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I give Chief a lot of (deserved) shitt on this thread, but I do admire and appreciate his military service and his volunteerism.
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rottingjohnny
Sport climber
mammoth lakes ca
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Oct 23, 2012 - 10:33pm PT
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Chief....WML....? I meant the other type of sheep...RJ
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Elcapinyoazz
Social climber
Joshua Tree
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Oct 24, 2012 - 02:06pm PT
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and other liquid hydrocarbons, which includes biofuels
Looks like your bosses, the DOE, agree that the AGWers notion that the worlds quantity of FF's are dissipiting, is unfounded and not true.
That's a nice non sequitur there Chief Barking Chihuahua. You do understand that biofuels are not fossil fuels...don't you? And you do understand that forecasts of production levels say nothing about reserves, proven reserves, URR, and percentage of URR already produced...don't you?
WhoTF am I kidding, you don't understand a thing, as you continually and loudly demonstrate your ignorance.
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Elcapinyoazz
Social climber
Joshua Tree
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Oct 24, 2012 - 03:00pm PT
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how can the DOE forecast higher production levels in 8-10 years with ED's statement regarding dwindling oil reserves?
Stunningly ignorant question. I think my six year old niece could answer this. Maybe I can put in a form that even Chief Chihuahua can understand:
I have a 48oz milkshake (oil in situ), I have a straw through which I can drink (produce) 2oz per minute. After two minutes, I have 44oz left, so I give my niece a second straw and we both start drinking. My production rate has doubled, yet my reserves are dwindling.
And my niece? She DRINKS YOUR MILKSHAKE, she drinks it up.
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 24, 2012 - 04:45pm PT
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how can the DOE forecast higher production levels in 8-10 years with ED's statement regarding dwindling oil reserves?
The Chief, obviously any answer that doesn't say "Because the Earth is making oil faster than we burn it" will not be considered by you to bea valid answer.
But, if my reading comprehension is up to par (and I believe it to be), Ed answered this question in the very post you question. Allow me to say it again: as oil prices rise, it becomes economically feasible to 'hunt' the oil that costs more to gather.
I've read that some technologies use more barrels of oil than they actually capture. In other words, they are net negative on energy production. I'm sure Base can offer the correct numbers, but heck, what would they mean to a person to doesn't give a hoot to what numbers mean.
In other words, your question has already been answered. Sorry you don't like the answer.
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Elcapinyoazz
Social climber
Joshua Tree
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Oct 24, 2012 - 04:52pm PT
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In other words, you do not have a viable answer for the question presented
You really do seem too stupid to breathe. I answered your question, directly and viably, in a manner easy enough that a third grader could understand it...yet you still can't seem to grasp it.
Since you're running about a single digit IQ, maybe it's time for you to shuffle off to the gettin' place for some of them thar mustard biscuits, slingblade.
Mmmmhmmm, I reckon we kin burn and pump earl faster and faster and never use it up, mmmhmmm.
KMan, the measure is typically EROEI (energy returned on energy invested), which looks at total energy balance, it doesn't tend to be oil specific. So for something like ethanol production, you'd account for the energy not only to plant, harvest, and process it, but also the energy to make the fertilizer, etc...so it's easier to deal with a universal energy content measure...BTUs or similar, rather than BOE (oil equivalents). But your point is correct, for many energy resources, the energy inputs to produce/extract them exceeds the energy contained within them. Depending ont the means and scale of production, many biofuels can fall into this category.
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 25, 2012 - 12:51am PT
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Watched it.
The key statement that hit me...
"Our planet, our future, the future of our children and their children and their planet..."
One problem with that, it's NOT our planet.
Funny, The Chief, the key statement that hits me is that they are "our children."
And yours, too.
I find it odd that you missed that.
It's curious that you don't seem to care about other people, or their children.
But you do care about yourself being taxed for carbon.
OK, that's all. Carry on now with your blow-hard attitude.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Oct 25, 2012 - 12:54am PT
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But there has to be a certain tipping point where decreases in US demand really do cause prices to go down, since we are the biggest consumer.
That would be true only if there was a truly free market. While I cannot
claim to be tuned into the gasoline market it does not seem like it could be
truly open with so few players and a seeming preponderance of long-term contracts.
But we digress...
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Oct 25, 2012 - 12:42pm PT
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Boy, somebody hit the nail on the head with the idea of Proven Reserves.
Domestic oil companies, who operate under the laws of the U.S. use all kinds of legal accounting tricks to overstate reserves.
While I can take a well and tell you what it will make in about twenty minutes (This used to be one of my jobs when I worked acquisitions), the big question is Proven Undeveloped Reserves, AKA PUD's.
Then you have actual reserves in the ground. This number is of no consequence, and I see it used with respect to the Bakken Shale all of the time.
The thing that matters is economically proven reserves. If oil or natural gas prices tank, the well will hit its economic limit far sooner, or won't be worth drilling at all.
That is the situation with most of the shale gas drilling right now. The wells are super expensive and gas prices have cratered. We found too much gas and the market is flooded. The only real pure gas drilling that is still going on is simply to put one well on each spacing unit to hold the leases for the future. The well itself will not pay out.
You really need to understand the various decline curve types to get this, but the low permeability zones all have steeply hyperbolic decline curves. This means that they come in screaming and then fall off rapidly, then flatten out at a lower rate and bleed forever.
Since so much of the reserves are produced in the first 12 to 18 months, that period is crucial when determining pay out. So if gas prices are low, you can't drill and make money.
Not all of the wells are like that, but the majority are. All of the horizontal plays are like that.
The Bakken has been given some wild numbers that are just lies. Yeah, if it was free to drill then there is a lot of oil there. Those wells cost 8 or more million bucks to drill and complete. A vertical might cost a million or so, depending on depth. A vertical just won't work in the Bakken.
The Bakken isn't new, either. It has been around for decades. The drilling mania that has taken place under the latter Bush and Obama administrations are directly related to oil price. If oil fell to 40 bucks per bbl, that drilling would stop just like the natural gas drilling has.
Oil prices are set on a global market. Most people don't realize that I get paid the same price as the Saudi's. When oil prices go up, the income from wells that I have drilled goes up, even if in Oklahoma. If prices go down, which trust me they do, then the wells often stop making money, so you either produce at a loss hoping for higher prices, or you plug the well.
Back to PUD's. The SEC really loosened up the rules for PUD's a while back, and now companies overbook PUD's.
I look at a press release saying that so and so company has hit twenty wells with an average of so and so, and then they book their entire acreage position based on those wells. Which is stupid. I can look at the decline curves of every well in the play, and if I understand the geology can see that most of their wells are stinkers. So their PUD's are actually far smaller than they state.
For the life of me, I can't see how this is legal.
Never buy domestic oil and gas stocks. Go buy Exxon and forget about it. Exxon is so vertically integrated that production is a small part of the company. They refine and market, too. So they can make money when oil goes down, although not as much.
As for biofuels, some are a waste of money, like the ethanol subsidy. Every blind goose in the energy industry knows that ethanol is not profitable without the subsidy, and worse, it is a good waste of corn.
Countries like Brazil are lucky to have so much sugar cane. That stuff is great. The sugars are already there.
Other types of biofuels have their own cost structure. Sure, there is a nigh infinite supply of biofuels, but will they pay for themselves?
They should right now, because oil is incredibly expensive.
One thing to remember. The Saudis have said this in television interviews:
They won't allow it. They will simply cut the price and suddenly that fuel will no longer be competitive with oil. It isn't a big deal right now, but it will be in the future.
Our only hope in that respect is if the Saudis are getting close to their production capacity. If they are, then oil prices will stay high for the future, opening up all kinds of other forms of energy.
It is all simple economics. Nothing difficult.
Hell, I can teach all of you.
The basics are how much the well will cost and how quickly you can make your cost back.
Cost is drilling and completing the well.
You also have gross production taxes, which vary a little by state, and royalties to the landowner, which can be a quarter of the income. It is typically 3/16 to 1/4 royalty.
How fast you make your money back is huge. We use NPV-10 a lot, which just means net present value up against a ten year payout. You can double your money fairly safely in other markets, so we discount our production against other investments.
You can buy an oil property that will pay out too slowly, and you are safer buying turnpike bonds or something.
I have to go to Denver right now or I would start posting some typical decline curves.
Anyway, the Bakken is really hyped. Sure, it is good, but the economically recoverable reserves are far lower. No way will it cover the country's needs. Not even close.
The fact is, we will never come close to oil independency without changing the side of the equation nobody wants to discuss. Decreasing consumption. For every bbl you save with a Honda Civic, that is one less bbl that we don't buy. Now that doesn't mean that oil prices will drop, the Chinese may pick up the slack.
And you always have the spectre over our heads of the Saudis flooding the market and dropping prices. At that point oil will be too cheap to pass up again.
Oil is different from Natural Gas. We are swimming in natural gas. Even the Iranians are moving towards natural gas as a transportation fuel, freeing up their domestic oil consumption to sale, and income.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Oct 25, 2012 - 01:18pm PT
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Natural Gas is a great transportation fuel. The only problem is that you will only get about half the distance from a tank full.
It is cleaner, both in nasty emissions and in Carbon. The engine lives longer.
UPS and similar fleet vehicles like City Busses have been using natural gas for a couple of decades. It works great if you don't stray too far from the filling station.
GE recently came out with a natural gas filling station "in a box". You can drop it onto any regular filling station that is on a natural gas pipeline and there ya go.
You can't fill up at home because home gas lines are typically super small and very low pressure. So not enough volume. It is pressurized to a liquid.
After lots of tests, it is no more likely to explode in a fireball than a regular gas tank.
I just finished up my contract with Chesapeake (so now I can say who I have been working for), and there is a natural gas filling station a few blocks away. The price is less than $1.50 per gallon.
I have no idea of how a gallon of LNG compares with gasoline, though.
Oil is a fantastic substance. You can take a cup of it and drive a car up a big hill. The same amount of work takes a bunch of guys. So it is incredibly energy dense.
That is one of the reasons that even now, at over 4 bucks, people buy it.
The natural gas industry has been screaming for years to use it more for transportation. If we just converted trucking to natural gas, it would cut our consumption by some big number.
The trick is to do it without subsidies. Nobody is going to give the E&P industry a subsidy like they do with farmers.
It has created some odd bedfellows. Al Gore is buddies with Boone Pickens, who paid a chunk of the cost for the "Swift Boating" of John Kerry.
Now a movie like "Promised Land" is coming out and the whole shale gas thing will be dumped on. Most of the problems with fracks have been in place for a while. Such as water being recycled.
The whole Frack thing has always been a red herring. Too bad.
We have a bunch of coal fired power plants in Texas and Oklahoma. Coal is a more efficient and a cheaper fuel (I guess) than natural gas. It drives us nuts.
Oh. Natural gas is found in the same way as oil. Almost all oil reservoirs produce some gas. I have found gas by accident. That is the way it goes.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Oct 25, 2012 - 01:45pm PT
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Yeah,
Have Ed figure out how much CO2 is released from methane on a horsepower basis. I know that it is less.
Conversion is cheap.
Now if you guys want to understand shale gas, either read the lengthy wiki page on Petroleum, or Google "Thermal Maturity" or "oil window."
A source rock has to buried and "cooked" at a certain temperature and pressure regime to generate oil. If you cook it some more, you get natural gas. If you cook it too much, you get graphite or one of its many cousins.
The gas shales follow the gas window around a basin. The shale gas wells produce from the very rocks that source oil and gas in a particular basin.
It usually takes 8 parallel horizontals to drain a square mile of land. It takes one to hold the leases, but 7 more to fully exploit it. This is a crazy spacing, because you can usually drain a gas reservoir with one or two vertical wells. The reason is that the fracks actually don't go very far in the shales, which are typically really thick. A couple of hundred feet at least. The permeability is in the nanodarcy range, where normal reservoir rocks have perm in the millidarcy or even darcy range.
The perm is so low that it can take a year for a methane molecule to migrate five feet to a fracture.
The number of indrilled increased density wells (those over the first well) is huge. Right now, very few operators are drilling more than one well per square mile.
Anyway, back to thermal maturity. There are very few oil wells below about 18,000 feet. It is too hot for an oil molecule to hang together.
There are vast areas where these source shales are in the gas window, like the Bakken. The perm is just way too low and the pore throats are too small to allow oil to migrate to the wellbore. In the better shales you can produce up to Butane or even Propane (C3 and C4), but a long oil molecule won't make it unless the shale is highly fractured or contains a more conventional zone within it. The Bakken is like that. You don't often drill a horizontal IN the actual Bakken. There are several directly adjacent rocks or in one case a zone in the middle of the Bakken, that has a really good fracture network.
That is how the Bakken is drilled these days anyway. The Bakken is pretty unique, although I have heard chit chat about a terrific shale in Argentina.
No way in hell are we ever going to be OIL sufficient. No way. I would have to write a tome on oil reserves, but no way. No way. The USGS can throw out any number that they like, but unfortunately the good petroleum geoscientists are all of making 250K a year for an exploration company.
Ed, Did they really say that? They must be smoking something.
It would take 20 Bakkens to do that.
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Elcapinyoazz
Social climber
Joshua Tree
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Oct 25, 2012 - 02:15pm PT
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I have no idea of how a gallon of LNG compares with gasoline, though
LNG has got about 2/3 the BTU value of a gallon of gasoline. So the GGE (gasoline gallon equivalent, the common comparison value for alt fuels) is ~1.5. For Diesel, for example, the GGE is 0.88 (i.e. diesel is more energy dense than gas), while for straight ethanol you're talking also about 1.5, E85 is about 1.4, etc.
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 25, 2012 - 02:32pm PT
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Wow, that's some interesting info Base. Thx for the share.
You say, I can take a well and tell you what it will make in about twenty minutes, and then go on to say, Our only hope in that respect is if the Saudis are getting close to their production capacity.
So I'm left with a question, does anybody but the Saudis know the level of their reserves? I'd be surprised if we didn't have estimates within a statistical probability.
On another track; I've been curious, and perhaps you care to share, did the loss of oil from the Horizon disaster impact world oil trade in any way?
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corniss chopper
climber
breaking the speed of gravity
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Oct 25, 2012 - 02:53pm PT
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The Warmist's scam of personal enrichment via climate scare tactics has been exposed and they're running for cover.
What they should be doing is researching ways to prevent the next ice age. Of course that means keeping the planet warm which for unknown reasons they think is a bad thing.
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corniss chopper
climber
breaking the speed of gravity
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Oct 25, 2012 - 03:10pm PT
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Anyone's who's flown over central Washington state may have asked how the hell did the land get shaped that way? It's unique.
google: Ice Age Floods of the Pacific Northwest
Several youtubes can be viewed with HD pictures of what the sudden ice age flooding did to the area. A glacier tongue closed off the drainage of a fork of the Columbia River in Idaho repeatedly during past ice ages. Then the impounded lake - called Glacial Lake Missoula in western Montana - would drain suddenly - 500 cubic miles of cold water would rush to the Pacific.
Stone age Humans may have been in North America at the time but no one is blaming them yet as the cause these floods.
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Splater
climber
Grey Matter
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Oct 25, 2012 - 03:27pm PT
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It is really quite pointless to spend much time actually attempting to have a rational discussion with the true deniers. It is one thing to bring someone up to speed on climate science who just doesn't know much about it. But once the science has been made clear enough, the denier will mostly try to just obfuscate with faux news type sources. They want you to waste your time arguing with them for another 20 years, thereby achieving their goal of continuing the status quo. Their real effort, as shown by the PBS show, is on the political side, since their real fear is possible policy changes. It's actually mostly a religious argument. They think that energy policy is some kind of alien invader. They can not admit that we already have an energy policy which subsidizes oil and coal, especially by not paying for external costs such as $2 trillion dollar wars every 10 years, and destruction of farms, mountains, rivers, & fish. Suburbs and sprawl are also directly tied to our policy of cheap oil and subsidized highways.
Once we admit that we do have an energy policy (what do you think the DOE does), the question is how to improve it. Incentives for greener power and transport are quite minor compared to fossil fuel subsidies. Corn based alcohol subsidies are not green; they're just a special interest pretending to be green, as is clean coal carbon recovery. Every economist knows that the simplest way to encourage alternatives is fossil fuel taxes (not Cap& Trade). Fuel taxes could substitute for income or property taxes. But it is written into the big book of American truthisms that gas, energy, and road taxes are evil. So instead we pursue methods that are only second best. One change that is happening is higher mpg requirements (which were delayed by 25 years due to similar deniers). Many times we get third or fourth best because we don't have a real discussion and instead have backdoor lobbyists and special interests writing the policy / laws.
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Bob Harrington
climber
Bishop, California
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Oct 26, 2012 - 12:17am PT
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Harlan Bretz. In the 1920's, he put forth the hypothesis that the channelled scablands of were formed by a huge flood. He met a lot of resistance from the prevailing uniformitarian paradigm, but his work was based on sound observation and deduction and eventually gained the favor that it enjoys today. Not really analogous to the climate change debate.
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the Fet
climber
Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La
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Oct 26, 2012 - 12:53am PT
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In Africa they laugh at the notion of AGW deniers. They can see the effects happening now. Desertification, droughts, etc.
I was in Africa last year and you could see the dry areas encroaching on what was forest.
But the deniers don't want to think about that and how their choices contribute to the suffering of the less fortunate. It's much easier for them to pretend "warmists" created a worldwide conspiracy of climate scientists to scare us with talk about the end of the world.
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climbski2
Mountain climber
Anchorage AK, Reno NV
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Oct 26, 2012 - 02:05am PT
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One of the interesting things about science is that a scientist can believe anything they want and it really doesn't matter. What matters is the work they have done and the results, their ability to think critically, communicate and work with peers.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Oct 26, 2012 - 03:46am PT
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A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling (2012)
Key Findings
* The U.S. climate modeling community is diverse, consisting of several large global climate modeling efforts and many smaller groups running regional climate models. This diversity allows multiple research groups to tackle complex climate modeling problems in parallel, enabling more rapid progress—but can also lead to duplication of effort, and makes it more difficult to prioritize limited human and computational resources.
* Promoting unification in some aspects of the U.S. climate modeling enterprise could enable more efficient, coordinated progress. This does not mean establishing only one U.S. center for climate modeling; instead, different climate modeling institutions could pursue their own methodologies but work within a common modeling framework in which software, data standard, tools, and model components are shared by all major modeling groups nationwide.
* Decision makers often desire climate data based on model projections at higher spatial resolutions and on more specific time scales than currently available. To provide these data, more powerful computing hardware will be needed. This will most likely be achieved not through developing faster computer chips, but by connecting far more computer chips together in parallel—a very different hardware infrastructure than the one currently in use. It will take significant effort to ensure that climate modeling software is compatible with this new hardware.
* Evolving to a shared software infrastructure for building, configuring, running, and analyzing climate models could help scientists navigate the transition to more complex computer hardware. The U.S. supports several climate models, each conceptually similar but with components assembled with slightly different software and data output standards. If all U.S. climate models employed a single software system, it could simplify testing and migration to new computing hardware, and allow scientists to compare and interchange climate model components, such as land surface or ocean models.
* An annual U.S. climate modeling forum would help bring the nation's diverse modeling communities together with the users of climate data. This would provide climate model data users with an opportunity to learn more about the strengths and limitations of models and provide input to modelers on their needs and provide a venue for discussions of priorities for the national modeling enterprise, and bring disparate climate science communities together to design common modeling experiments.
* Many physical and chemical processes can affect both climate and weather, but because climate varies over such long time periods, it takes longer to collect observational data to test the models thoroughly. Developing models that function across both weather and climate timescales would allow the testing of climate models on weather timescales where there is more abundant observational data. These efforts would be most successful if they involved collaboration among operational weather forecast centers, data assimilation centers, climate modeling centers, and the external research community.
* Meeting the diverse needs of climate data users—which vary over time and range from local to global scales—involves ensuring that climate data are useful and easily understandable to all users. There are organizations (public and private) that currently translate the output of climate models for users, but there are no mechanisms for assuring the quality of the information provided. Developing a national education and accreditation program to train climate model interpreters to use technical findings and output from climate model in a range of applications could help ensure the accuracy and appropriateness of climate information, as well as help communicate users needs back to climate model developers.
* To address the computing needs of the climate modeling community, the report suggests a two-pronged approach that involves the continued use and upgrading of existing climate-dedicated computing resources at modeling centers, together with research on how to effectively exploit the more complex computer hardware systems expected over the next 10 to 20 years.
* Sustained observational data on factors such as temperature, precipitation, clouds, snow and ice, and ecosystem change is critical for advancing understanding of the processes that drive the climate system. Over the next several decades, it will be important to maintain existing long-term datasets of essential climate variables, and to launch innovative new climate measurements that help characterize Earth system processes.
* Model development is among the most challenging tasks in climate science. Indications are that the number of climate model developers is not growing in the United States. Graduate fellowships in modeling centers, extended postdoctoral traineeships of three to five years, and rewards for model advancement through well-paid career tracks could help entice high caliber computer and climate scientists to become climate model developers.
* Ever larger amounts of climate model and observational data are being generated. Facilitating broad access to these data for researchers, data users, and decision makers is challenging but increasingly important. Beyond stabilizing support for current data infrastructure efforts, the United States should develop a national information technology infrastructure that builds on existing efforts to facilitate and accelerate data display, visualization, and analysis, for experts and the wider user community.
* To meet national needs for improved climate information over the next several decades, U.S. climate modelers will need to address an expanding breadth of scientific problems while striving to make predictions and projections more accurate. Progress toward this goal can be made through a combination of increasing model resolution, advances in observations, improved model physics, and more complete representations of the Earth system. As a general guideline, priority should be given to climate modeling activities that focus on addressing societal needs and where progress is likely, given adequate resources.
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