Collaborative Research: Climate Process Team on Low-Latitude Cloud Feedbacks on Climate Sensitivity

这笔拨款将支持一个由8个研究小组和3个建模中心组成的气候过程和建模小组（CPT）的合作研究项目。通过让研究云、湍流和对流过程细节的专家更直接地参与参数化开发，这是一项重点工作，旨在更好地代表气候模型中影响低纬度云反馈的过程。第一个研究目标是充分了解美国国家大气研究中心（NCAR）社区大气模式（CAM）和地球物理流体动力学实验室（GFDL）大气环流模式（GCM）中亚热带边界层云对二氧化碳倍增的不同响应。第二个更宏大的目标是分析热带对流云系统的云反馈，该系统密切耦合微物理、对流、辐射和湍流过程的参数化。这些目标将通过与三个建模中心密切协调的科学家核心小组来实现。他们将使用基于一系列区域和全球观测的诊断研究、单列分析和建模工作、GCM敏感性研究和使用NCAR CAM的参数化交换测试、GFDL的大气GCM、美国国家航空航天局（NASA）戈达德太空飞行中心的GCM，以及“超参数化”模拟。预计CPT的更广泛影响是：(1)减少气候模式对未来气候变化预测的不确定性，这是美国合理制定国家和国际适应和监管战略以及能源政策的基本需求。它还应该(2)改善美国主要气候模型的物理基础，并促进合作，以维持这些模型的未来改进，从而使美国气候科学研究的整个领域受益。

This grant will support a collaborative research project among eight research groups and three modeling centers working as a Climate Process and Modeling Team (CPT). It's a focused effort aimed at better representing processes affecting low-latitude cloud feedbacks in climate models, by involving experts on the details of cloud, turbulence and convection processes more directly into parameterization development. The first research goal is to fully understand the very different response of subtropical boundary layer cloud in the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Community Atmospheric Model (CAM) and the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory's (GFDL) atmospheric general circulation model (GCM) to CO2 doubling. The second more ambitious goal is to analyze cloud feedbacks from tropical convective cloud regimes, which intimately couple parameterizations of microphysical, convective, radiative and turbulent processes. These goals will be achieved by a closely coordinated scientist core group working with three modeling centers. They will use diagnostic studies based on a suite of regional and global observations, single-column analysis and modeling efforts, GCM sensitivity studies and parameterization-swap tests using the NCAR CAM, GFDL's atmospheric GCM, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center's GCMs, and 'superparameterization' simulations.The anticipated broader impacts of the CPT are to (1) reduce uncertainty in climate model projections of future climate change, a basic US need for rational formulation of national and international adaptation and regulatory strategies and energy policy. It should also (2) improve the physical basis of leading US climate models as well as fostering collaborations that sustain future improvements in these models, benefiting the entire spectrum of US climate science research.