Projects in CCR's Climate Change Prediction

CCR's Climate Change and Prediction group carries out fundamental research into understanding the processes that influence the natural variability of earth’s climate system, and relates those processes to possible future manifestations of anthropogenic climate change. We perform climate change simulations with the CCSM concerned with the major forcings on the climate/carbon system such as greenhouse gases (GHGs), ozone, land cover, solar variability, volcanoes, and sulfate aerosols.

The CCP group is a strong contributor to the federal Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) in several high priority areas and has taken a leading intellectual and simulation role in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments. Climate modeling groups around the world are already looking ahead to the next IPCC assessment report (the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report or AR5) and are beginning to formulate the experimental design for coordinated climate change experiments that will be ready for assessment for the AR5 process (beginning in roughly 2009). As part of this effort, the NCAR CCP group has begun the project planning for the AR5. The AR5 timeline will require CCSM development to finish by 2009 and the simulation integrations to take place during the 2010-2011 in order to meet the projected AR5 publication data in early 2013. This version of CCSM will be run with interactive carbon and other biogeochemical cycles that will require long simulations of the order of 1000 years to spin up and stabilize land-chemistry-vegetation interactions prior to starting the climate change projection simulations. To address this, we will be carrying out a broad range of coordinated climate change simulations at low, medium and high resolution with various forcings and scenarios. The overarching goal for this project is to ensure that the U.S. has a substantial and credible presence in the current and upcoming national and international assessment reports.

This work is carried out under the DOE/UCAR Cooperative Agreement between the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) and the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Biological and Environmental Research (OBER) in support of the DOE U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) as part of the DOE Climate Change Prediction Program (CCPP). The DOE/UCAR Cooperative Agreement has fostered strong collaborations between the scientists and software engineering teams at NCAR, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the National Energy Research Supercomputing Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The DOE/UCAR Cooperative agreement has been a model for interagency collaboration and multi-institutional coordination in pursuit of the DOE Climate Change Prediction Program mission for advancing climate change science and improving climate change projections using state-of-the-science-coupled climate models, on time scales of decades to centuries, and space scales of regional to global.

High resolution figure

Figure 1. a) Time series of CO2 concentrations for the various scenarios, b) time series of globally averaged surface air temperatures from the PCM and CCSM3, c) same as (b) except for sea level rise from thermal expansion only. In (c) the control drift is first subtracted from each experiment, and then in (b) and (c), the base period for calculating anomalies is 1980-99. Solid lines are ensemble means and shading indicates range of ensemble members. Line identifiers for the various scenarios and the two models are given in each panel of the figure (from Meehl et al., 2005).