NASA Earth system models and modeling infrastructure were designed to meet specific needs of modelers, and to support fairly esoteric scientific interests. However, easier access to these models may make them usable outside of the traditional NASA earth science community, in "what if" scenarios and forecasts supporting operational and policy decisions on various time scales. This is likely to attract new users and uses of NASA models and model outputs, in such diverse fields as aviation, weather and climate, agriculture, environmental and ecosystem management, energy / utility industries, real estate, and many others that could benefit from improved access to predictive modeling for decision-making, planning, and management. Much as the wide availability of satellite data in the 1980s, and of digital Census data in the 1990s, spawned a market for repackaging, customizing, and mining public data for use in a variety of settings, easier and broader model access is likely to grow the market for targeted software applications that can harness these models for myriad practical applications. This project aims to provide standard Web service interfaces to NASA's Earth Science models, for use by fellow scientists, decision-makers, and many others. By opening access to its model and computing resources, NASA meets its obligations to serve broader interests (including academic and other agency partners), and grows the number of users and uses of NASA models, thus enhancing the impact and value of these models, and strengthening continued support for high-end computing and modeling. By facilitating access to numerical models through standard, well-known services, NASA also provides a fertile environment in which many different entities [rather than a handful of people "in the know"] can compete to develop software tools for validation, further analysis, or societal applications. Standard Web interfaces give commercial entities "a leg up," decreasing the time they require to build applications that use models and their outputs. And broader competition, within a standards-based "level playing field," is likely to increase the diversity and quality of software choices available to NASA for use with its models.
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