Toward a cloud ecosystem for modeling as a service

The atmospheric modeling community in the United States has relied mostly on high performance computing facilities (e.g., NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing facility and XSEDE resources) and local computing clusters to perform weather prediction research. Cloud computing represents a fundamental change in the way IT services are developed, deployed, operated, and paid for, placing science communities in the middle of a major paradigm shift. The cloud appears to be a potential avenue for atmospheric science researchers to gain access to significant and seamless computing resources beyond the traditional supercomputing centers for end-to-end weather and climate modeling studies, democratizing access to high performance computing resources, vast amounts of storage, and unprecedented access to large volumes of data.