Interdisciplinary Projects

CGD links knowledge across a wide variety of disciplines, natural and social sciences, primarily through CGD's interdisciplinary sections. This multi-faceted scientific knowledge is reflected in CGD's ability to tackle difficult science issues from a variety of perspectives.

A true community effort including collaboration with scientists from universities, national laboratories, and other research organizations to develop, continuously improve and support the scientific use of a comprehensive Earth modeling system.

With the goal to understand and quantify uncertainties in atmospheric river (AR) science based on choice of detection/tracking methodology.

Nearly all energy used for human economy is, at some point, dissipated thermally within Earth's atmosphere or land. This is a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics - the tendency of energy towards higher entropy forms.

The NCAR-DOE cooperative agreement. This group encompasses climate change research, CMIP simulations and multi-model analysis, a hierarchy of models of varying complexity and studies of climate change and variability on multiple timescales.

Enables researchers and students to identify and make effective use of climate data sets by providing a focal point for expert-user guidance, commentary, and questions on the strengths and limitations of selected observational datasets and their applicability to model evaluations.

Focused on improving understanding of the climate change issue by better integrating research on both human and earth systems.

The analog of AMIP for global coupled ocean-atmosphere general circulation models. CMIP began in 1995 under the auspices of the Working Group on Coupled Modelling (WGCM) which is in turn under auspices of CLIVAR and the Joint Scientific Committee for the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP)

Examines how oceanographic conditions shape benthic marine ecosystems in the Coral Triangle, and determines how changes in these conditions will influence those ecosystems in the 21st Century. During this first phase of the project, our immediate goal is to examine how spatial and temporal patterns of coral bleaching within the Coral Triangle will change over the 21st Century, with a better understanding of the physical and biological mechanisms driving those changes.

The transient climate evolution of the last 21,000 years (Last Glacial Maximum to present) provides key observations for constraining climate sensitivity and understanding abrupt climate change.

Understanding and quantifying the difference in climate-related risks between alternative levels of future climate change are critical to informing climate change policies, such as mitigation and adaptation.

Identifies and prioritizes critical research gaps in climate modeling with specific significance to geoengineering.

Aims to organize the process of developing new socioeconomic scenarios to facilitate interdisciplinary research and assessment on climate change mitigation and adaptation.

A modular biogeochemical modeling suite for next-generation ocean models. This project is developing an Oceanic General Circulation Model (OGCM) independent library for the simulation of marine ecosystems and biogeochemical cycles. The objective is to produce a flexible ocean biogeochemical modeling (OBM) tool that will facilitate research on a range of scientific questions.

In spring 2006, US CLIVAR established the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) Working Group (MJOWG).

Examines the realistic representation of tropical convection in our global atmospheric models which is a long-standing grand challenge for numerical weather forecasts and global climate predictions. This effort is intended to exploit the vast amounts of existing and emerging observations, the expanding computational resources and the development of new, high-resolution modeling frameworks, with the objective of advancing the characterization, diagnosis, modeling, parameterization and prediction of multi-scale convective/dynamic interactions, including the two-way interaction between tropical and extra-tropical weather/climate.