Abstract:
The Community Earth System Model (CESM) is a coupled climate model for simulating Earth's climate system. Composed of five separate models simultaneously simulating the Earth's atmosphere, ocean, land, land-ice, and sea-ice, plus one central coupler component, CESM allows researchers to conduct fundamental research into the Earth's past, present, and future climate states.
The CESM system can be
... configured a number of different ways from both a science and technical perspective. CESM supports several different resolutions and component configurations. In addition, each model component has input options to configure specific model physics and parameterizations. CESM can be run on a number of different hardware platforms and has a relatively flexible design with respect to processor layout of components. CESM also supports both an internally developed set of component interfaces and the ESMF compliant component interfaces.
The CESM project is a cooperative effort among U.S. climate researchers. Primarily supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and centered at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, the CESM project enjoys close collaborations with the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Scientific development of the CESM is guided by the CESM working groups, which meet twice a year. The main CESM workshop is held each year in June to showcase results from the various working groups and coordinate future CESM developments among the working groups. The CESM website provides more information on the CESM project, such as the management structure, the scientific working groups, downloadable source code, and online archives of data from previous CESM experiments.
[Summary provided by NCAR.] 
