Big Projects, Diverse Users, and Usable Data: Lessons and Examples from NARCCAP

The North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP) is an international program to produce high resolution climate change scenarios and investigate uncertainties in regional scale projections of future climate by nesting multiple regional climate models (RCMs) within multiple atmosphere- ocean general circulation models (AOGCMs) forced with the A2 SRES scenario and with historical data over a domain covering the conterminous United States and most of Canada. The resulting 60+ TB of data will be archived for distributed storage and made available to global change impacts researchers worldwide via the Earth System Grid (ESG). This presentation will describe the progress of the project and challenges we have encountered, and will discuss some useful techniques and practices for the management of large collaborative modeling projects, promotion of data usability, and building and maintenance of a diverse end user community. Examples of some preliminary results from the high-resolution GCM timeslice experiments and the NCEP-driven historical RCM runs will also be presented.