Improving the Effectiveness of U.S. Climate Modeling (2001) / Chapter Skim
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Increased Societal Demands on U.S. Modeling
Increased Societal Demands on U.S. Modeling
Pages 43-50
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From page 43... ...
For example, the combination of observations of climate change and projections of future alterations to climate resulting from anthropogenic inputs and natural variability have increased the awareness of the importance of accounting for the impacts of climate change. As a result, there have been increasing demands on the climate modeling community to provide climate data for use in assessments of the impacts of climate change at various time scales, on regional and global scales.
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From page 44... ...
As the problems are recognized to be intimately related and mutually dependent, it is expected that the demands on the modeling community for both assessments will converge. 4.2 IPCC The IPCC was established in 1988 under the joint auspices of the WMO and the UNEP: "to assess the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of humaninduced climate change.
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From page 45... ...
Indeed, it is hard to see how the major industrialized nations of the world could make vital national decisions about greenhouse gases unless their own scientists have been involved. The Hadley Centre, for example, was created within the United Kingdom Meteorological Service to perform the data analyses and modeling runs needed to feed the IPCC process, especially with respect to detection and attribution of existing climate change and projection of future climate change.
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From page 46... ...
The regional specificity of the two global models was poor with a resolution of T42 or approximately 300 km at the latitude of the United States. At the resolutions of these models orography was severely truncated, and it became difficult to assess future water resources in those regions that depend on mountain icepack for meltwater, since the extent of such icepack was badly misrepresented in the models and the height of the mountains was generally too low; the effect of warming on the icepacks was therefore generally too large (e.g.
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From page 47... ...
MODELING 47 2. Comparison of successive assessments might demonstrate a deeper insight into the response of the global climate and the regional climate.
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From page 48... ...
and the inability of the United States to address climate change assessment requirements (NRC, 1998a) indicates that responding to the national assessment in the future will be a major problem for the U.S.
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From page 49... ...
It is clear that many nations, including the United States, will expand their research in seasonal-to-interannual predictions, create operational forecast systems, and apply the results for public good and private gain. 4.5 DECADAL AND LONGER VARIABILITY One of the major advances of climate research over the last decade or so has been the realization that decadal and longer variability in the past has taken place in only a handful of patterns, in particular the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)
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From page 50... ...
Over the United States increasing amounts of variance of temperature and precipitation are successively explained by ENSO, the PDO, and the NAO (Higgins et al, 2000) , implying that being able to predict these patterns would explain successively greater amounts of these crucial climatic variables, with obvious social and economic implications.
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