Fifteen months ago, academic climate scientists expressed worries that a new climate model sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) was going to harm existing modeling efforts, siphoning off talent and funding when federally funded science is short on both. The biggest concern: that the Accelerated Climate Modeling for Energy (ACME) project, meant to forecast local impacts of climate change and to be used on DOE’s future exascale supercomputers, would dilute resources from the Community Earth System Model (CESM). That model, managed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, is built on science and code continually developed by U.S. academics and DOE scientists and is partially funded by DOE. Besides, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal space and ocean agencies, respectively, each have two other models; could creating a sixth U.S. climate model work?

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