The Community Earth System Model (CESM) is a coupling of five different models which are combined to simulate the dynamic interactions between and within the Earth's atmosphere, ocean, land, land-ice, and sea-ice. In this work, the installation and testing of CESM on Portland State University's Cluster for Climate Change and Aerosol Research (CsAR) is described and documented, and two research applications of the model are performed. First, the improved treatment of cloud microphysics within recent versions of CESM's atmospheric module is applied to an examination of changes in shortwave cloud forcing (SWCF) and results are compared to output from older versions of the model. Second, the CESM model is applied to an examination of the effect that increased methane (CH4) concentrations have had on the catalytic destruction of stratospheric ozone (O3) by ozone depleting compounds (ODCs) such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and nitrous oxide (N2O).