SGER: Statistical Analysis of Multi-Model Ensembles of Climate Experiments

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The PI is one of a small team of scientists from North America and Europe who will work collaboratively to establish a baseline for regional climate prediction over the continental U.S. and Canada using regional climate models nested within atmospheric data fields derived from reanalyses (the National Centers for Environmental Prediction-Department of Energy Reanalysis 2 and the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting reanalysis). He will work within an innovative regional climate change project called North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP). The U.S. NARCCAP objective is to develop a framework within the regional climate modeling community that advances substantially the responsiveness of U.S. regional climate research to national priorities. The significance of NARCCAP is that it will advance the status of regional climate modeling in the US in support of understanding the basic science of regional climate and will provide state-of-the-art information on regional climate for impacts studies. The specific goals of NARCCAP are to explore the combined uncertainty in climate change scenarios that results from using multiple atmosphere-ocean general circulation models to provide boundary conditions for multiple regional climate models (RCMs), and ultimately to provide regionally resolved data sets suitable for examining the impacts of climate change. A critical first step toward these goals is to establish a baseline of RCM accuracy by evaluating the participating RCMs when driven by reanalysis (loosely, "observed") boundary conditions. The PI's role is to develop a general statistical framework for synthesizing model output to obtain estimates of climate change and examine sources of variation attributable to the RCM, the Atmosphere-Ocean Global Circulation Model (AOGCM), and the downscaling from the AOGCM to the RCM. The PI will provide a testbed for the development of analysis methodology to support the larger-scale NARCCAP experiments and to focus the more extensive scientific planning for NARCCAP based on the statistical analysis of model results. Broader Impacts: The need for regional modeling to assess climate impacts is recognized in the U.S. Climate Change Science Program Strategic Plan (CCSP, 2003), http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/stratplan2003/vision/development.htm ,and was emphasized even more strongly in the NRC review of the CCSP plan. This project will help the nation meet this need.