Seminars & Events

Computing, Environment and Life Sciences
"Climate Change in your Backyard: The Role of Regional Climate Models"

DATE: July 22, 2010
TIME: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
SPEAKER: Robert J. Oglesby, Professor of Climate Modeling, University of Nebraska Lincoln
LOCATION: Building 240 Conference Room 1404, Argonne National Laboratory
HOST: Robert Jacob

Description:
IPCC and other current projections of climate change rely on global models of climate that must be run at a coarse horizontal resolution – approximately 150 km for many of the models used in the recent IPCC AR4. The next IPCC assessment (AR5), underway as of this writing, has only increased that resolution to about 100 km. As stressed by IPCC, results at the global scale are useful for indicating the general nature and large-scale patterns of climate change, but are not very robust at the local or regional scale. This is for two key reasons: 1) the model can only explicitly resolve physical processes operating over several hundred kilometers or larger; and 2) spatial surface heterogeneities, especially regions of complex topography or differing land use patterns, can be large and occur on small spatial scales of 5-20 km.

We use a high-resolution (order 10 km), limited-domain (i.e., regional) climate model to perform a physically-based downscaling. Because climate is inherently global in nature, a limited-domain model must be driven at its lateral boundaries by either observations or output from a global model. Output from a global model is required if scenarios of future climate change (e.g., due to greenhouse gas warming) are needed, while observations (in reality the proxy reanalyses) can be used if, for example, the effects on regional climate of changes in land use patterns is under investigation. Representative results will be presented, with a focus on the central U.S.

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