Can a single family of models simulate the weather for Manhattan, Malaysia, and Mars? Thanks to a successful interagency collaboration, the answer is “yes.”

Huge temperature swings are well known to residents of the Front Range of Colorado, thanks to the arrival of sharp winter cold fronts as well as chinook-driven warm-ups.

For NCAR’s Don Middleton, the uneasy days after 9/11 shed unexpected light on the transformative power of global connectivity. Middleton had been scheduled to attend a meeting on advanced collaboratories in Italy, but the event was cancelled.

Whether or not they could be definitively linked to a changing climate, weather crises in the first years of the 2000s added regional exclamation points to the global possibilities raised by modeling and theory. A relentless 2003 heat wave in normally temperate Europe took tens of thousands of lives.

Integration and collaboration were major themes as NCAR and UCAR made their way through the first decade of the new century.