Regional Climate Modeling and Air-Sea Coupling

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corinna Schrum
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Climate Modeling ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Regional Scale ◽  
Regional Climate Modeling ◽  
Climate Impact ◽  
Regional Models ◽  
Climate Research ◽  
Ocean Models

Regional models were originally developed to serve weather forecasting and regional process studies. Typical simulations encompass time periods in the order of days or weeks. Thereafter regional models were also used more and more as regional climate models for longer integrations and climate change downscaling. Regional climate modeling or regional dynamic downscaling, which are used interchangeably, developed as its own branch in climate research since the end of the 1990s out of the need to bridge the obvious inconsistencies at the interface of global climate research and climate impact research. The primary aim of regional downscaling is to provide consistent regional climate change scenarios with relevant spatial resolution to serve detailed climate impact assessments. Similar to global climate modeling, the early attempts at regional climate modeling were based on uncoupled atmospheric models or stand-alone ocean models, an approach that is still maintained as the most common on the regional scale. However, this approach has some fundamental limitations, since regional air-sea interaction remains unresolved and regional feedbacks are neglected. This is crucial when assessing climate change impacts in the coastal zone or the regional marine environment. To overcome these limitations, regional climate modeling is currently in a transition from uncoupled regional models into coupled atmosphere-ocean models, leading to fully integrated earth system models. Coupled ice-ocean-atmosphere models have been developed during the last decade and are currently robust and well established on the regional scale. Their added value has been demonstrated for regional climate modeling in marine regions, and the importance of regional air-sea interaction became obvious. Coupled atmosphere-ice-ocean models, but also coupled physical-biogeochemical modeling approaches are increasingly used for the marine realm. First attempts to couple these two approaches together with land surface models are underway. Physical coupled atmosphere-ocean modeling is also developing further and first model configurations resolving wave effects at the atmosphere-ocean interface are now available. These new developments now open up for improved regional assessment under broad consideration of local feedbacks and interactions between the regional atmosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere.

scholarly journals Urban Climates and Climate Change

2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 411-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valéry Masson ◽  
Aude Lemonsu ◽  
Julia Hidalgo ◽  
James Voogt
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Climate Modeling ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Urban Climate ◽  
Regional Climate Modeling ◽  
Climate Impact ◽  
Local Climate ◽  
Urban Climatology ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Global Agenda

Cities are particularly vulnerable to extreme weather episodes, which are expected to increase with climate change. Cities also influence their own local climate, for example, through the relative warming known as the urban heat island (UHI) effect. This review discusses urban climate features (even in complex terrain) and processes. We then present state-of-the-art methodologies on the generalization of a common urban neighborhood classification for UHI studies, as well as recent developments in observation systems and crowdsourcing approaches. We discuss new modeling paradigms pertinent to climate impact studies, with a focus on building energetics and urban vegetation. In combination with regional climate modeling, new methods benefit the variety of climate scenarios and models to provide pertinent information at urban scale. Finally, this article presents how recent research in urban climatology contributes to the global agenda on cities and climate change.

scholarly journals West African monsoon precipitation impacted by the South Eastern Atlantic biomass burning aerosol outflow

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Solmon ◽  
N. Elguindi ◽  
M. Mallet ◽  
C. Flamant ◽  
P. Formenti
Keyword(s):  
Biomass Burning ◽  
Climate Modeling ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Regional Scale ◽  
West African Monsoon ◽  
Regional Climate Modeling ◽  
West African ◽  
African Monsoon ◽  
Low Cloud

AbstractThe West African Monsoon (WAM) is a complex system depending on global climate influences and multiple regional environmental factors. Central and Southern African biomass-burning (SABB) aerosols have been shown to perturb WAM during episodic northward inter-hemispheric transport events, but a possible dynamical connection between the core of the SABB aerosol outflow and the WAM system remains unexplored. Through regional climate modeling experiments, we show that SABB aerosols can indeed impact WAM dynamics via two competitive regional scale and inter-hemispheric dynamical feedbacks originating from (i) enhanced diabatic heating occurring in the Southeastern Atlantic low-cloud deck region, and (ii) aerosol and cloud-induced sea surface temperature cooling. These mechanisms, related to aerosol direct, semi-direct, and indirect effects, are shown to have different seasonal timings, resulting in a reduction of June to September WAM precipitation, while possibly enhancing late-season rainfall in WAM coastal areas.

Implementation of NEMO v4.0.1 as ocean component for the regional climate modeling framework

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janna Abalichin ◽  
Birte-Marie Ehlers ◽  
Frank Janssen
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Baltic Sea ◽  
North Sea ◽  
Climate Modeling ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Regional Climate Modeling ◽  
Water Levels ◽  
Climate Extreme ◽  
Modeling Framework ◽  
The Impact

<p>The ‘German Strategy for Adaptation to Climate Change’ (DAS) provides the political framework to climate change mitigation and adaptation in Germany. The associated ‘Adaption Action Plan’ envisages the establishment of an operational forecasting and projection service for climate, extreme weather and coastal and inland waterbodies. This service is intended to make use of a regional climate modeling framework, with NEMO v4.0.(1) as the ocean component. The atmospheric component will be provided by the German Weather Service (either the current weather forecasting model ICON or COSMO will be used) and will be coupled to NEMO after testing and calibration of NEMO on the regional scale.</p><p>The area of interest includes besides the North Sea and the Baltic Sea the entire North-West-Shelf to take into account cross-shelf transport, the water exchange between North Sea and Baltic Sea and the impact of North Atlantic weather systems on the internal dynamics of the seas. One focus area will be German Bight, well known for its large tidal flats, which make wetting & drying a desirable model feature, which will be tested in future. The used/implemented bathymetry includes the up to date measurements of the sea floor from the EMODNET network.</p><p>To achieve a proper description of the dynamics in this region the model has to be calibrated with regard to the timing and amplitude of the water levels in the coastal waters, the water inflow through the Danish straits, the thermal stratification as well as the seasonality and thickness of the sea ice in the Northern Baltic Sea.</p><p>These efforts are carried out in the pilot project ‘Projection Service for Waterways and Shipping’ (ProWaS).</p>

Coordinated Global and Regional Climate Modeling*

2015 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. F. Scinocca ◽  
V. V. Kharin ◽  
Y. Jiao ◽  
M. W. Qian ◽  
M. Lazare ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Regional Climate Model ◽  
Climate Model ◽  
Climate Modeling ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Global Climate Model ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Value Added ◽  
Regional Climate Modeling ◽  
Climate Projections ◽  
Climate Modelling

Abstract A new approach of coordinated global and regional climate modeling is presented. It is applied to the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis Regional Climate Model (CanRCM4) and its parent global climate model CanESM2. CanRCM4 was developed specifically to downscale climate predictions and climate projections made by its parent global model. The close association of a regional climate model (RCM) with a parent global climate model (GCM) offers novel avenues of model development and application that are not typically available to independent regional climate modeling centers. For example, when CanRCM4 is driven by its parent model, driving information for all of its prognostic variables is available (including aerosols and chemical species), significantly improving the quality of their simulation. Additionally, CanRCM4 can be driven by its parent model for all downscaling applications by employing a spectral nudging procedure in CanESM2 designed to constrain its evolution to follow any large-scale driving data. Coordination offers benefit to the development of physical parameterizations and provides an objective means to evaluate the scalability of such parameterizations across a range of spatial resolutions. Finally, coordinating regional and global modeling efforts helps to highlight the importance of assessing RCMs’ value added relative to their driving global models. As a first step in this direction, a framework for identifying appreciable differences in RCM versus GCM climate change results is proposed and applied to CanRCM4 and CanESM2.

scholarly journals Regional Climate Modeling over South America: A Review

2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvina A. Solman
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
South America ◽  
Climate Models ◽  
Climate Modeling ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Regional Climate Change ◽  
Regional Climate Models ◽  
Regional Climate Modeling ◽  
South American ◽  
Sensitivity Studies

This review summarizes the progress achieved on regional climate modeling activities over South America since the early efforts at the beginning of the 2000s until now. During the last 10 years, simulations with regional climate models (RCMs) have been performed for several purposes over the region. Early efforts were mainly focused on sensitivity studies to both physical mechanisms and technical aspects of RCMs. The last developments were focused mainly on providing high-resolution information on regional climate change. This paper describes the most outstanding contributions from the isolated efforts to the ongoing coordinated RCM activities in the framework of the CORDEX initiative, which represents a major endeavor to produce ensemble climate change projections at regional scales and allows exploring the associated range of uncertainties. The remaining challenges in modeling South American climate features are also discussed.

scholarly journals Deriving user-informed climate information from climate model ensemble results

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 261-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heike Huebener ◽  
Peter Hoffmann ◽  
Klaus Keuler ◽  
Susanne Pfeifer ◽  
Hans Ramthun ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Models ◽  
Climate Model ◽  
Climate Modeling ◽  
Research Output ◽  
Model Simulation ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Regional Climate Modeling ◽  
Climate Impact ◽  
Final Project ◽  
User Workshop

Abstract. Communication between providers and users of climate model simulation results still needs to be improved. In the German regional climate modeling project ReKliEs-De a midterm user workshop was conducted to allow the intended users of the project results to assess the preliminary results and to streamline the final project results to their needs. The user feedback highlighted, in particular, the still considerable gap between climate research output and user-tailored input for climate impact research. Two major requests from the user community addressed the selection of sub-ensembles and some condensed, easy to understand information on the strengths and weaknesses of the climate models involved in the project.

Regional Climate Modeling for the Baltic Sea Region

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Kjellström ◽  
Ole Bøssing Christensen
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Baltic Sea ◽  
Climate Models ◽  
Climate Modeling ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Regional Climate Modeling ◽  
Sea Surface ◽  
The Baltic Sea ◽  
Baltic Sea Region ◽  
The Baltic

Regional climate models (RCMs) are commonly used to provide detailed regional to local information for climate change assessments, impact studies, and work on climate change adaptation. The Baltic Sea region is well suited for RCM evaluation due to its complexity and good availability of observations. Evaluation of RCM performance over the Baltic Sea region suggests that: • Given appropriate boundary conditions, RCMs can reproduce many aspects of the climate in the Baltic Sea region. • High resolution improves the ability of RCMs to simulate significant processes in a realistic way. • When forced by global climate models (GCMs) with errors in their representation of the large-scale atmospheric circulation and/or sea surface conditions, performance of RCMs deteriorates. • Compared to GCMs, RCMs can add value on the regional scale, related to both the atmosphere and other parts of the climate system, such as the Baltic Sea, if appropriate coupled regional model systems are used. Future directions for regional climate modeling in the Baltic Sea region would involve testing and applying even more high-resolution, convection permitting, models to generally better represent climate features like heavy precipitation extremes. Also, phenomena more specific to the Baltic Sea region are expected to benefit from higher resolution (these include, for example, convective snowbands over the sea in winter). Continued work on better describing the fully coupled regional climate system involving the atmosphere and its interaction with the sea surface and land areas is also foreseen as beneficial. In this respect, atmospheric aerosols are important components that deserve more attention.

Using Social Media to Improve Peer Dialogue in an Online Course About Regional Climate Modeling

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morgan B. Yarker ◽  
Michel D.S. Mesquita
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Information Exchange ◽  
Online Courses ◽  
Climate Modeling ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Regional Climate Modeling ◽  
Effective Learning ◽  
Classroom Dialogue ◽  
E Learning

Recent technology advancements provide worldwide information exchange that has been invaluable for the scientific community, particularly for issues surrounding global climate change. Many online learning spaces have developed which are often repositories of information rather than a space of knowledge construction. Classroom dialogue is shown to be an important component for effective learning, therefore it should be developed online as well. This article explores how social media can support dialogue in e-learning. Interactions were studied in two online courses about regional climate modeling. The first used traditional forums and the other promoted a Facebook group for online interactions. Qualitative results indicate that the Facebook group showed improvement because elements of dialogue began to emerge, including open-ended questions and episodes of peer discussion. Quantitative findings suggest the Facebook interactions were perceived as more informal and participants posted, responded, and interacted with their peers more significantly than traditional forums.

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