Collaboration Research: Development and Evaluation of Downscaling Tools for Near-Surface Wind Climates

通过数值模式（耦合的大气-海洋全球气候模式（AOGCM）），气候系统正越来越精确地在大尺度上进行模拟。然而，仍有必要使用降尺度工具在适合影响分析的空间尺度上描述气候。近地面风速的变化长期以来一直被认为对气候变化对社会的影响具有特别重要的意义，其影响包括热舒适、结构设计、利用可再生能源的可行性、农业和林业以及土壤侵蚀。然而，尚未充分开发或评估可用于在影响分析中应用所必需的空间尺度上推导历史、当前或未来条件下近地面风速气候学的工具。该项目将开发和应用物理（动力）和统计（经验）降尺度工具到AOGCM输出，以提供各种降尺度风气候工具的准确性评估，生成美国邻近地区和周围沿海水域风速概率分布的预测，并量化这些预测中的不确定性。本研究利用气候模型产品与北美区域气候变化评估项目和政府间气候变化专门委员会第四次评估报告紧密结合。因此，它是一项更大努力的一部分，旨在更好地了解和预测全球和区域气候，并向一系列潜在的最终用户社区传播气候信息。为了促进这种信息的传递，将开发当前和可能的未来风气候的数字地图集，并从印第安纳大学主持的一个动态项目WWW网站上向公众开放。这项研究的更广泛影响还包括对研究生和本科生的培训和教育，特别关注女性学生或来自传统上在科学学科中代表性不足的其他群体的学生。

The climate system is being increasingly accurately modeled at large scales by numerical models (coupled Atmosphere-Ocean Global Climate Models (AOGCM)). However, it remains necessary to use downscaling tools to describe climate on spatial scales suitable for impact analyses. Changes in near-surface wind speeds have long been acknowledged as having particular importance for climate change impacts on society via their impact on, for example, thermal comfort, structural design, feasibility of harnessing renewable energy resources, agriculture and forestry and soil erosion. However, tools have not yet been fully developed or evaluated which can be used to derive climatologies of near-surface wind speeds for historical, current or future conditions at the spatial scales necessary for application in impact analyses. This project will develop and apply physical (dynamical) and statistical (empirical) downscaling tools to AOGCM output to provide an assessment of the accuracy of various tools for downscaling wind climates, to generate projections of probability distributions of wind speeds for the contiguous USA and surrounding coastal waters, and to quantify uncertainties in those projections.The research couples closely with the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program and the 4th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change process by utilizing climate model products generated within those programs. It is thus part of a larger endeavor designed to better understand and predict global and regional climates, and to disseminate climate information to a range of potential end-user communities. To facilitate this information transfer a digital atlas of current and possible future wind climates will be developed and made publicly accessible from a dynamic project WWW site hosted by Indiana University. The broader impacts of the research also include training and education of graduate and undergraduate students with a specific focus on students who are women or are from other groups that are traditionally under-represented in science disciplines.