3:30PM Mountain Daylight Time
Members present: Eric Apel, Alison Baker, Kelly Barsanti, Ben Johnson, Brad Klotz, Anna Malushenko, Carol Ruchti, Peter Sullivan, Holger Vömel, Olga Wilhelmi, Lulin Xue
Also present: Glen Romine from the Directorate’s Office
Membership updates
NSA-EC welcomed three new members: Lulin Xue (RAL), Olga Wilhelmi (RAL), and Brad Klotz (EOL).
NSA-EC has one MMM and one CGD vacancy.
Efforts to find a new chair will proceed when all vacancies are filled.
Discussion with Glen Romine
NCAR Strategic Plan: Will be a refined version of existing plan, shorter and sharper. Will retain an emphasis on emergent and actionable science, and one goal of the plan is to amplify the investments in these areas. NCAR plans an associated hiring initiative, in particular in predictability. New this round will be a greater effort to distribute the implementation plan, which will amplify expectations and key performance indicators. The goal is to make what is expected more accessible and easier to align individual contributions (i.e., performance evaluations) with the strategic plan.
Earth System Predictability and Prediction (ESPP) Vision and Plan are new and will require more input. Yaga Richter will lead ESPP, one topic of which is climate intervention.
There was an extended discussion about Computational Science, Computational Infrastructure, Model Unification, and Earth System Science data. One of the goals is to house existing datasets in a community framework and create an interface to make them easier to access. It was noted that MMM has worked with John Hopkins, and created such a framework for turbulence data. Similarly, there is a goal to democratize model output. Questions include how to maintain such systems and how to make sound investments. One barrier to these translational research capabilities is the lack of expertise on emerging compilers or large language models for faster software development.
Funds for NSA-EC: We will be submitting requests to the President’s office to support activities led by NSA, as well as to support a 0.1 FTE assignment for the incoming NSA-EC chair. The former chair was supported at this level with laboratory funds.
NSA website update
NCAR Research IT asked us to implement recommended security protocols for the NSA website (https://nsa.ucar.edu/). This was done and the website now has a security score of 110/100.
Meeting schedule
NSA EC will do a survey to find a better time for the regular meetings. Some current members have conflicts and there may be a better regular time.
Special topics should only be scheduled when there are topics to be discussed.