The Collaboratorium currently uses three primary kinds of models.

• Climate models
  These are models of the world's physical systems and are used to project the impact of future greenhouse gas emissions on the world's climate. The most sophisticated of these are known as general circulation models (GCMs), which serves as an important input to the assessment reports prepared periodically by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

• Integrated assessment models (IAMs)
  These models assess the impact of various policies designed to address climate change. IAMs typically incorporate economic and technological variables, as well as a physical science model that is a less complex than a GCM.

• Bottoms up technology models
  These models assess the impact on emissions of the adoption of new technologies. The launch version of the Collaboratorium does not include any technology models, but this is an area where models could be incorporated soon.

Current models

The launch version of the Collaboratorium includes the following models:

• C-LEARN, a Web-based version of C-ROADS, a simulation of Sustainability Institute and Ventana Systems that is part of the Climate Interactive effort
• Sea level rise module, based on Rahmstorf’s correlation between historical temperature increases and sea level rise
• Physical impacts model from the Tyndall Center
• Climate change damage costs based on DICE and PAGE2002
• Climate change mitigation cost scenarios from the U.S. Climate Change Program's 2007 study , using model runs of IGSM, MiniCAM, and MERGE

For more on these, see the Models page

Future models

In the future the Collaboratorium will incorporate extensions of existing models, as well as new models, based on how the Community chooses to augment and add to the current suite of models.

As part of this effort, the Collaboratorium Community anticipates embracing the principles of radically open modeling, where large numbers of users will work together to enhance the modeling capability of the system.

The current thinking of the Collaboratorium Community is that extensions to existing models and new models can be proposed by any members. But final approval by accredited experts must be given before new models or new functionality for existing models is made available in the system.

For more on how radically open modeling could work, see Steps toward radically open modeling.

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