Climate Research and Modeling
Program Highlights for FY 2009
The Climate Research and Modeling Program assimilates observations to produce retrospective and current analyses of climate conditions, examines the attribution of climate events, and develops models to make climate predictions and projections relevant to users. The program draws upon three capabilities: understanding climate processes; Earth system modeling, predictions, and projections; and analysis and attribution. The program maintains a suite of operational climate outlooks and strives to implement the next-generation operational climate outlooks and assessments by improving climate models, improving forecast generation techniques, and maintaining real-time climate monitoring data sets. Two essential components of the program are the global climate analysis data sets generated by synthesizing diverse data sources using state-of-the-art forecast models, and the regular and systematic attribution of causes of past, current, and evolving climate conditions using modern climate diagnostic techniques.
Activities under this program leverage an extensive array of peer-reviewed, university-based competitive research activities to understand atmospheric and oceanic processes, both natural and human-related. Research may be directly applied to climate projection and to policy decisions, and provides timely and adequate information.
This program provides the Nation with a seamless suite of environmental forecasts and projections from intraseasonal to multidecadal time scales and regional to global spatial scales. The program helps regional and national managers to better plan for the impacts of climate variability, and to provide climate assessments and projections to support policy decisions with objective and accurate climate change information.
Activities in FY 2009 will:
- Continue model experiments and paleoclimate research on potential mechanisms, patterns, causes, and impacts of abrupt climate change event
- Support research to assess the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation variability and its implications for rapid climate change
Continue to construct high-quality reanalysis of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system from the start of the satellite era (late 1970s) through 2007
- Provide global climate analyses required to describe major features of 20th century climate and the capacity to address the causes of observed regional climate variations under the project Explaining Climate to Improve Predictions (ECIP)
- Study the interactions between aerosols and non-CO2 gases, enhanced measurements of atmospheric water vapor, and interactions of pollutants with climate change
- Continue to focus on the calibration and validation of research-mode ensemble forecasting techniques for surface and subsurface hydrological parameters, especially on longer seasonal time scales
- Complete a coupled ocean/sea-ice model based on new ocean model code base
- Complete a high spectral resolution radiation model for use in next-generation attribution
- Continue to understand the transport and properties of absorbing aerosols and their precursors to the Arctic polar region in an effort to quantify the contribution of absorbing aerosols to the melting of Arctic ice
- Continue analysis of isotopes and other tracers to quantify the uptake of anthropogenic CO2 by the global ocean and its distribution within the ocean's interior
- Improve the representation of two key processes in climate models in order to predict the future magnitudes of the two largest global carbon sinks: fertilization of forests by increasing atmospheric CO2, and draw-down of carbon in the Southern Ocean resulting in its storage in intermediate and deep waters.
Source: www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/Library/ocp2009/ocp2009-doc.htm
