Support for the World Climate Research Programme 2023 - 2025

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The project of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) is based on the outcomes of deliberations with the broader international scientific community, partners, and sponsors, including members of the United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). The project pursues frontier scientific questions related to the coupled climate system that are too large and too complex to be tackled by a single nation, agency, institution, or scientific discipline. Through this project, WCRP brings together scientists from the US and around the world, at all stages of their careers, to advance our understanding of the multi-scale dynamic interactions between components of the climate system and external forcing, as well as addressing and studying the role of humans on climate and society. WCRP informs the development of policies and operationally focused climate services, and promotes science capacity building and education, which is done through partnerships with other programs such as Future Earth. The project will advance the scientific knowledge and understanding of the Earth’s climate system, and to provide the climate information needed to support climate risk management and solutions. Proposed activities subdivided into two pillars are relevant for and resonate with two of USGCRP’s new pillars (1) Advancing Science and (2) Advancing International Coordination.WCRP will advance understanding of potential tipping points in the Earth system, emphasizing the complex interactions between physical and social systems that could cross thresholds and lead to tipping points. The project will overcome long standing systematic errors in climate models. A rigorous approach will be pursued for climate data collection and analyses to understand the underlying mechanisms leading to extreme events; as well as a diversity of modeling and simulation approaches that span a range of complexity, processes, and spatial resolutions. The project will develop new activities related to precipitation research, including WCRP’s planned Decade of Water. It will connect to the relevant US activities and spin up new efforts, especially over South America and Africa where new alliances are being formed to support the delivery of regional Global Precipitation Experiment activities. End-to-end work on water and water availability will evolve that will specifically also deal with the impact of changes of the hydrological cycle on societies. Funds will also be used to establish regional work in the Americas and on the African continent to co-develop and co-deliver climate information in those locations. This will also cover capacity development and training of the next generation of climate scientists.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.