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

这笔赠款将支持八个研究小组和三个建模中心作为气候过程和建模团队(CPT)工作的一个合作研究项目。这是一项有重点的工作，旨在通过让云、湍流和对流过程的细节专家更直接地参与参数化开发，更好地在气候模式中表示影响低纬云反馈的过程。第一个研究目标是充分了解国家大气研究中心(NCAR)的社区大气模式(CAM)和地球物理流体动力学实验室(GFDL)的大气环流模式(GCM)中副热带边界层云对二氧化碳倍增的截然不同的响应。第二个更雄心勃勃的目标是分析热带对流云制度的云反馈，热带对流云制度将微物理、对流、辐射和湍流过程的参数化紧密结合在一起。这些目标将由一个密切协调的科学家核心小组与三个建模中心合作实现。他们将使用基于一系列区域和全球观测、单柱分析和建模工作、GCM敏感性研究和参数交换测试的诊断研究，这些测试使用的是NCAR CAM、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和超参数模拟。CPT预期的更广泛影响是：(1)减少未来气候变化的气候模型预测的不确定性，这是美国合理制定国家和国际适应和监管战略和能源政策的基本需要。它还应该(2)改善美国领先气候模型的物理基础，并促进合作，以维持这些模型未来的改进，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.