Climate & Carbon Sciences Program Projects:
Development of Frameworks for Robust Regional Climate Modeling
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Principal Investigator: William D. Collins
LBNL Research Team: Bill Collins, Fuyu Li, TBD
Lead Laboratory Principal Investigator:
L. Ruby Leung, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Other Principal Investigators of Multi-Laboratory Project:
Todd D. Ringler, Los Alamos National Laboratory
David C. Bader, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Predicting the regional hydrologic cycle at time scales from seasons to centuries is one of the most challenging goals of climate modeling. Because hydrologic cycle processes are inherently multi-scale, increasing model resolution to more explicitly represent finer scale processes may be a key to improving simulations of the hydrologic cycle. The overall objective of the proposed research is to develop frameworks for robust modeling of regional climate and hydrologic cycle, and to improve understanding of factors contributing to uncertainties in simulating future changes in the regional hydrologic cycle.
This project employs a hierarchical approach to test the veracity of global high resolution, global variable resolution, and nested regional climate model for regional climate modeling. A central hypothesis is that hierarchical evaluation of different modeling approaches will lead to better understanding of their relative merits and improve the frameworks for robust regional climate simulation.