PRAC Collaborative Research: Testing Hypotheses about Climate Prediction at Unprecedented Resolutions on the NSF Blue Waters System

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This proposal is for a provisional allocation of time on the Blue Waters computer system, due to become operational in 2011, and for travel funds to support technical coordination by various collaborators with the Blue Waters project team and vendor technical team.The project team will use Blue Water resources for investigations designed to test two hypotheses about the Earth's climate system. The first is that the transport fluxes and other effects associated with cloud processes and ocean mesoscale eddy mixing are significantly different from the theoretically derived averages embodied in the parameterizations used in current-generation climate models, and that these differences explain a large portion of the errors in these models. The second is the hypothesis that a more faithful representation of these eddy-scale processes will increase the predictability of the climates generated by climate models. To test these hypotheses, the project team plans to perform three sets of numerical experiments using three cutting-edge climate models, the Community Climate System Model, a new version of the Community Climate System Model that includes an innovative treatment of cloud processes, and the Colorado State University Global Cloud-Resolving Model.The proposed, high-resolution simulations will also provide a dataset that will allow study of the variability of regional climate as the global-scale climate evolves and provide information about the interplay of weather and climate.The proposed project will answer an important question about the intrinsic reliability of current generation climate models whose predictions are important for understanding the likely impacts of climate variation and strategies for their mitigation. It will improve the quality of information provided to policy-makers and expand its range, providing more information about regional climate variability and its influence on precipitation. The project is led by a member of a demographic group that is under-represented in geosciences research.