Enabling open development methodologies in climate change assessment modeling

Models play a central role for climate change policy-makers, but they're often so complex and computationally demanding that experts must run them and interpret their results. This reduces stakeholders' ability to explore alternative scenarios, increases perceptions of model complexity and opacity, and can ultimately reduce public confidence. The Radically Open Modeling Architecture (ROMA) is a Web service designed to address these problems by providing two core functionalities: the creation and running of surrogate simulations, which are fast approximations of much larger integrated assessment models, and a componentized view of models and stored model runs that allow clients to combine components to create new executable composite models.