CESM Governance

The following are key roles and documents that support the delivery and governance of the CESM activity.

Role/document	Summary/notes	Links to documents/ pages
CESM Strategy	This is the foundation for prioritization decisions. (as this is currently quite broad we would benefit from a document giving more prioritization of areas but that does not exist right now and may be part of below doc).	The CESM Strategic Plan
CESM Scientific Steering Committee	This is the project board and main decision body for issues escalated by the Chief Scientist. It acts on behalf of the project sponsor (NCAR Director).	SSC ToR
CESM Chief Scientist	This is the project lead for the CESM core activity. This role manages the total committed resource to ensure delivery. It escalates issues to the SSC where significant changes are needed to agreed delivery or resourcing.	Chief Scientists
CESM Working groups	These are the key constructs for CESM. The carry out engagement with the community and organize the delivery of work across the activity. They report to the CSc. Each working group generally has an internal (to NCAR) and external co-chair.	Working Groups
CESM Advisory Board (CAB)	This is the 4th line of assurance for the CESM activity providing advice to the CESM Chief Scientist, the project sponsor (NSF/NCAR), and NCAR leadership	CAB ToR

Summary

Defining the core activity

The CESM core activity includes the development, production of data and community support and engagement within the CESM activity. It is managed by NCAR on behalf of NSF to support US climate research underpinned by the community earth system model.

Governance of CESM core activity

Governance is the framework of authority and accountability that defines and controls the outputs, outcomes and benefits from projects, programs and portfolios. Delivering community modeling capabilities is a core mission of NCAR on behalf of NSF. Resources to deliver the CESM core activity are delegated from the NCAR Director (through the CGD director) to the CESM Chief Scientist. The Chief Scientist will manage these resources to deliver agreed priorities of the CESM core activity.

Where challenges arise that mean significant changes need to be made to either the planned outcomes for the CESM core activity or priorities need to significantly change then the Chief Scientists will escalate these to the Science Steering Committee (SSC) for CESM. The SSC is the group that governs significant changes and plans to the CESM core activity on behalf of the Director of NCAR.

In making decisions on priorities and goals for CESM, the SSC will take into account the role of key partnerships that underpin the delivery of CESM, community priorities and the broader goals of NCAR to deliver modeling capabilities across all space and timescales.

A further assurance process for the CESM activity is the use of an advisory group. The CESM Advisory board acts to provide independent advice to those involved in the governance and delivery of CESM core activities.

Introduction

Here we describe the components of the CESM activity, define the core activities and describe how the whole activity is managed and resources. This expands on the summary above.

The CESM activity

The CESM activity is a broad umbrella that brings together a range of scientists and software engineers whose work is linked to the CESM model. That may be work:

Developing and evaluating CESM and its user interfaces
Producing data from experiments using CESM for broad community use
Supporting users of CESM and its data
Utilizing CESM for a range of experiments to underpin research or applications.
Utilizing data from simulations with CESM for research or applications.

Figure 1 highlights these uses and how it is important to consider the whole of these activities for coordination as the utilization of CESM and its data need to inform the development of the system and experiments done through the “Science goals”. You can also note that core activity has been defined and this will be discussed.

Figure 1: The CESM activity

Defining governance, collaboration and the core activity

Governance is the framework of authority and accountability that defines and controls the outputs, outcomes and benefits from projects, programs and portfolios. The mechanism whereby the investing organization exerts financial and technical control over the deployment of the work and the realization of value. (Taken from APM Body of Knowledge 7th edition).

In Figure 1, the activities labeled core are the areas where governance needs to be applied (responding to the science goals and capability priorities linked to applications of the modeling capabilities).

The governance, led by NCAR should:

govern their investment in CESM core activity to ensure it meets community and broader needs
understand and prioritize community demand across the core activities
manage collaboration and partnerships with community activities that contribute to core activities.

Therefore you can consider CESM governance as: the prioritization of CESM development and support to best meet the needs of the community (both CESM and the broader NCAR community); the management of collaboration with community activities that underpins the core CESM activities; and the community engagement to gather and prioritise requirements.

Roles and responsibilities for governing the CESM core activities

Figure 2 shows the flow of delegated authority and governance processes for the CESM core activity. It highlights that NSF commits resources to NCAR to deliver its broader remit. The NCAR director delegates resources and responsibility for delivery to the CESM Chief Scientist supported by the Science Steering Committee. The CESM Chief Scientist utilizes working groups to manage the different components of the CESM core activity. Wrapping all this is an advisory board who can independently review the activity and provide advice to all those involved.

Prioritization and community needs

As new science and technology comes along it tends to grow demand on the CESM core activity. It is therefore vital that we are able to prioritize the committed resource in the core activity. Old capabilities may need to be retired to ensure code remains manageable and some areas of development may need to be slowed or paused to focus on others. While working groups, the chief scientist and the SSC can support priority decisions this can be most equitably done using a framework.

There is a Strategy for CESM. This is broader than the core activity but is a starting point to consider prioritisation but does not help weigh off one activity from another. Our framework needs to support the governance in setting how to deploy or redeploy effort.