27-28 June 2013
Fort Collins, Colorado
The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) expects to play a leading role in developing the scientific understanding, modeling and prediction tools needed to meet the challenges for the sustainable management of water resources at all scales. This will be accomplished with help from the Global Energy and Water Exchanges (GEWEX) core project. The unique role of GEWEX, in this context, is to exploit the internationally diverse set of satellite, in-situ, and modeling resources to foster a global approach to understanding and predicting precipitation and its uncertainty at scales from local to global with resolutions of hours to decades and longer.
This workshop seeks to flesh out details related to .Observations and Predictions of Precipitation. (see GEWEX Science Questions) by focusing on key science needs, identifying communities working on related questions, workshops and organizational structures that can help focus these activities, as well as financial and human resources necessary to reach an initial implementation stage.
The specific questions that will be addressed by the workshop include:
- How well can precipitation probability distributions and accumulations be described by various observing systems, what defines the uncertainty estimates at various space and time scales and how can it be improved in the future?
- How can observations of water and energy related quantities be used to better understand relationships among these variables and how they influence observed precipitation at various scales?
- How much confidence do we have in global and regional climate predictions of precipitation?, and what metrics can be applied to track progress in capturing the current climate and future change?
- What is the role of data assimilation in bridging the gap between observations and models and what planned and new observing systems could improve knowledge going forward?
The proposed Workshop will be divided into half-day sessions over a period of two days. Each session would begin with one or two overview presentations followed by structured discussions of the above questions. The conclusions of the Workshop will be documented in a synthesis report describing the knowledge gaps identified during the Workshop and steps to be taken to address them. This will form the basis for the Science and Implementation Plan for this GEWEX Science Question and, and in turn, the WCRP Grand Challenge.
Participants at the Workshop will include specialists from multiple disciplines including Observations, Modeling and Data Assimilation. Attendance will be limited to approximately 25 invited participants. All participants will contribute to a briefing at the end of the Workshop during which session chairs will outline, with relevant background, the issues considered at the Workshop and the main conclusions.