ESSL Community Models
Tools for the Research Community, Developed in Collaboration with the Research Community
The Community Climate System Model (CCSM)
The Community Climate System Model (CCSM) is a fully-coupled, global climate model that provides state-of-the-art computer simulations of the Earth's past, present, and future climate states.
The CCSM is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Administration of the CCSM is maintained by the Climate and Global Dynamics Division (CGD) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
CCSM development is pushed forward by CCSM Working Groups, which are relatively small teams of scientists that work on individual component models or specific coupling strategies. Each team takes responsibility for developing and continually improving its component of the CCSM consistent with the CCSM goal of a fully-coupled model and with the CCSM design criteria. Working groups maintain their own webpages.
Visit the CCSM website for more information and to download.
The Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF)
The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model is a next-generation mesocale numerical weather prediction system designed to serve both operational forecasting and atmospheric research needs. It features multiple dynamical cores, a 3-dimensional variational (3DVAR) data assimilation system, and a software architecture allowing for computational parallelism and system extensibility. WRF is suitable for a broad spectrum of applications across scales ranging from meters to thousands of kilometers.
The effort to develop WRF has been a collaborative partnership, principally among the National Center for Atmospheric Research's (NCAR) Mesoscale & Microscale Meteorology Division, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and the Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL), the Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA), the Naval Research Laboratory, Oklahoma University, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). WRF allows researchers the ability to conduct simulations reflecting either real data or idealized configurations. WRF provides operational forecasting a model that is flexible and efficient computationally, while offering the advances in physics, numerics, and data assimilation contributed by the research community.
WRF development is pushed forward by 15 WRF Working Groups, which are relatively small teams of scientists that work on individual components of the model. Working groups maintain their own webpages.
Visit the WRF website for more information and to download.
The Whole Atmosphere Community Model (WACCM)
The Whole-Atmosphere Community Climate Model (WACCM) is a comprehensive numerical model, spanning the range of altitude from the Earth's surface to the thermosphere. The development of WACCM is an inter-divisional collaboration that unifies certain aspects of the upper atmospheric modeling of HAO, the middle atmosphere modeling of ACD, and the tropospheric modeling of CGD, using the Community Climate System Model (CCSM) as a common numerical framework.
Visit the WACCM website for more information and to download.