Collaborative Research: The North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP)--Using Multiple GCMs and RCMs to Simulate Future Climates and Their Uncertainty

Iowa State University, Ames IA

Investigators

Abstract

The goals of The North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP) are to: (1) develop and make openly available, multiple high resolution regional climate change scenarios for use in impacts and risk assessments; (2) evaluate regional model performance over North America by nesting the Regional Climate Models (RCM) in coarser spatial scale reanalyzed data products; (3) understand critical regional climate change issues, such as the effects of increased greenhouse gases on the frequency of various types for extreme weather events; (4) enhance understanding of key issues in regional climate modeling, including methodological approaches; (5) conduct a limited examination of uncertainties in regional model and global climate model (GCM) future regional projections; (6) create greater collaboration between US, Canadian, and European climate modeling groups to leverage the diverse modeling capability across the countries; and (7) coordinate with and derive added value from diverse regional and global modeling projects and programs currently underway in the US, Canada, Europe, and South America. Broader impacts of the research include support for the climate impacts community to provide decision-relevant information for public policy, in part through a user-oriented data access, formatting and archival facility for output from the simulations. NARCCAP will contribute to a wide range of climate research by producing regional-scale projections of climate change. In doing so, the program will enhance the infrastructure for climate-change research by linking several North American and European institutions in a collaborative network for multi-model simulation, output analysis and data dissemination. The program's output will promote undergraduate and graduate research at the participating institutions and foster cross-disciplinary links across campuses and between institutions. Collaborating PIs supported by NSF: Mearns, Linda O., National Center for Atmospheric Research (Lead) Sloan, Lisa C., University of California-Santa Cruz Gutowski, William J. Iowa State University Sain, Stephan R., University of Colorado at Denver NOAA and DOE are also supporting NARCCAP collaborating PIs: NOAA: Roads, John O., University of California-San Diego Scripps Inst of Oceanography DOE: Bader, David C., Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Leung, Lai-Yung (Ruby), Battelle Northwest Laboratories Duffy, Philip B., Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory The NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, the NSF-sponsored National Center for Atmospheric Research and the DOE Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are providing additional in-kind support.