Land-Atmosphere Interactions: A Core Program in Support of Community Climate Models

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Abstract ATM-9419715 Dickinson, Robert E. University of Arizona Title: Land-Atmosphere Interactions - A Core Program in Support of Community Climate Modeling This project focuses on understanding and parameterizing the interactions between land and the atmosphere in the context of global change models. Its objectives are: to establish, through data analyses, numerical process studies and model stimulations, the function of the most important atmospheric processes, from the viewpoint of coupling to land-surface processes; and on the basis of these studies, to develop new or improved parameterizations for GCMs, implement and test these parameterizations in NCAR community climate system models, and provide successful parameterizations to the NCAR climate modeling community. This proposal brings together and supports a strong research team with a wide variety of background and experience, each with important individual skills. The proposed work will: expand the basic understanding of the processes responsible for land-atmosphere coupling; determine how these operate in NCAR community models; determine how these processes differ, if they do, from those in other climate models of comparable merit; determine how these observations, sensitivity studies, and model intercomparisons are necessary to clarify the relative correctness of differing parameterizations; and develop indicated new treatments that are suitable, in the context of GCM's, for future improvements and upgrades by the scientific community. Individual subprojects designed to pursue these objectives include: studies of interactions between the land surface and clouds in the planetary boundary (PBL); characterization of cloud radiative fluxes and their coupling to the land surface; parameterization of the effects of mesoscale circulations in a GCM, including moist processes, clouds and precipitation; observation characterization of relationships between cloud properties, atmospheric thermodynamics propert ies, and land cover; observational search for effects of Amazon deforestation on cloud processes; further exploration of climate effects of Amazon deforestation to better understand land-surface interactions; and paleoclimatic linkages. These studies will use satellite, radiosonde, and surface data for their observational analyses. Satellite data analyses will emphasize the use of a local archive of high-resolution (30 km) ISCCP data. They will also use integrations of mesoscale and global climate models, with an emphasis for the latter on NCAR community models. Theoretical and parameterizations analyses will use mesoscale model integration and various 1-D convection parameterizations. The proposed work will contribute substantially to great understanding of and confidence in the use of NCAR climate system models for projections of future climate. This will be done by promoting major advances in what is arguably now one of the weakest aspects of model performance from the viewpoint of scientific understanding and practical aspects of climate simulation. The performance of the proposed research will provide training and education on these questions for a generation of graduate students and post-doctoral trainees. This award is under the USGCRP, Climate Modeling, Analysis and Prediction (CMAP) project.