Knowledge engineering methods for climate models

We are involved in the construction of problem solving environments for coupled climate modeling. Numerical simulations of climate models that include atmospheric, oceanographic, geological, and other sub-models need to coordinate information along the boundaries between the sub-models in order to model correctly the interaction between the disparate sub-systems. Conventional high performance computing programming paradigms make it difficult for users to integrate existing model components such as atmosphere, oceans, and chemistry because of the absence of uniform model development; no mechanism for integrating research results exists. This situation can be substantially remedied by the use of problem solving environments (PSE) : A PSE is a computer system that provides all the computational facilities necessary to solve a target class of problems. These features include advanced solution methods, automatic and semi-automatic selection of solution methods, and ways to easily incorporate novel solution methods. This application area leads us to the components that a PSE of this kind requires