Hack: For many scientists, it's not a question of whether the planet will warm, but more a question of how much the planet will warm and what form the regional distribution of that warming will take. Answering... these questions will require additional levels of sophistication in global climate models, such as improved resolution and extending existing modeling frameworks to include fully interactive chemical and biogeochemical processes. These kinds of extensions are... extremely expensive in computational terms. We will require a minimum of a twenty-five-fold improvement in computational technology to enable the next-generation model [in] three to five years.

Heimbach: You need to run coupled ocean-atmosphere simulations over 10 to 100 years. We think that these models, and the underlying model errors, are still such that we need to do more basic research to understand the errors better. That's what we are trying to address.

Should the federal government be doing more to fund supercomputer research and supercomputer capacity?

Hack: The federal government should treat supercomputer technology in the same way that it treats other strategically important areas, like those related to national defense and national security. It's too important to the nation's scientific and economic competitiveness to be left to chance.

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