Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER) is a team member on the Research and Development High Performance Computing System contract recently awarded to CSC by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This new computing system will allow NOAA to improve the accuracy of global and regional climate models and advance weather forecasting capabilities critical to the protection of life and property. The indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract has a four-year base period, one four-year option, and one one-year transition option, bringing the estimated contract value to $317 million if all options are exercised. The first year will be funded at $49.3 million by NOAA using funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. AER’s primary role is to provide numerical weather prediction and climate model science algorithm expertise. AER will work with CSC software engineers to help ensure the integrity of the NOAA weather and climate model products as they are migrated to the more robust high-performance computing system.

“We look forward to working with Atmospheric and Environmental Research on this critical initiative enabling NOAA to be able to produce more accurate and agile environmental models helping the nation better understand how the earth’s climate is changing, and to share computing resources across the agency and its research partners,” said Mike Gaffney, president of CSC’s North American Public Sector Civil and Health Services Group. “We selected AER because the importance of preserving the computational integrity of NOAA’s climate and weather models cannot be overstated.”

“We’re looking forward to working with CSC on this critical NOAA initiative. This effort enables NOAA to provide more robust modeling and analysis of the earth’s weather and climate which will contribute to the nation’s ability to assess and manage the impact of climate change,” said Ron Isaacs, executive vice president, Atmospheric and Environmental Research.

To support the optimization of the NOAA climate and weather models in the new supercomputing system, the AER team will leverage its more than 30 years of relevant research and operational experience on how the models work, how the algorithmic processes that occur within the models relate to the underlying science, and how to analyze and verify their numerical accuracy.