CGD Research: CCR Overview

Climate Change Research: Present and Future Climate Change Research

Studies of decade-century climate change: 20th Century and 21st Century

Studies have been performed with state-of-the-art global coupled climate models (AOGCMs) that address future climate change in the context of the natural variability of the ocean and coupled ocean-atmosphere-sea ice-land/vegetation-hydrological systems. The research has aimed at identifying spatial and temporal patterns in climate data and model results that are associated with climate change, especially on regional scales. We have devoted effort into identifying the dynamical processes that produce these patterns through application of concepts and methods from climate dynamics. This will provide a physical interpretation of the regional character of model projections and will assist in assessing their reliability. Through the framework of the Weather and Climate Impacts Assessment Strategic Initiative at NCAR we are collaborating with statisticians in the NCAR Geophysical Statistics Project (GSP) and the Institute for the Study of Science and the Environment (ISSE) at NCAR to interpret the climate change results from our modeling studies. This provides us more objective measures of uncertainty and innovative methods to examine changes in climate.

Such efforts to relate natural variability to forced response in the 20th century led to the analysis and publication of results from the extensive set of PCM 20th century experiments with single and various combinations of natural and anthropogenic forcings mentioned above (Meehl et al., 2003; Meehl et al., 2004). Because we were able to isolate the effects of single forcings with multi-member ensembles, these results made the case more forcefully than before that much of the early 20th century warming was due to natural forcings (mostly solar), while most of the late century warming was due to anthropogenic forcings (mostly GHGs). During this last year we have accomplished the following research.

CGD Sectional Narratives

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