Global and regional climate sensitivity is defined primarily by feedbacks to the planets' hydrological cycle that in turn alter the planet's energy balance. These feedbacks involve processes that are 'fast' such as cloud and precipitation processes, evolving within the 'weather envelope', or slow such as changes related to land cover, carbon exchanges or ice sheet extent that evolve within the 'climate envelope'. Research within CIRA and in conjunction with the ATS faculty has made important contributions to the observing, understanding and modeling of important processes key to improving numerical weather/climate prediction.
The severe decrease in Arctic sea ice in 2007 underscores the delicate connections between changing weather and climate trends (e.g. Kay et al., 2008). Shifts in weather processes, such as the drying of the atmosphere and the clearing of Arctic clouds (perhaps associated with decadal oscillations), accelerated the sea ice loss and amplified the slower climate forcing effects of sea ice. As another example, predictions of long-term trends in air quality must consider not only emissions projections but also the affect that climate change will have on regional to-global scale weather patterns (e.g., impacting transport, trapping inversions, etc.). In acknowledgement of the importance of the weather-climate connection, the Department of Energy's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement and Climate Change Prediction Programs now run a climate model in NWP mode.
Research conducted under this theme employs a combination of numerical models and environmental data to understand processes that dictate changes on weather and climate timescales (minutes to months to years) and the two-way interactions between weather systems and regional and global climate. Research related to the hydrologic cycle, carbon exchanges and turbulent flux exchanges all have the ability to influence both weather and climate and thus form the basis of this research theme. Also included are those studies that look at weather systems from a process perspective and the development of data sets intended for climate trend analysis.
RELATED PROJECTS
CIRA's projects falling under this theme currently fall generally into surface exchanges, clouds and the hydrologic cycle, including snow and ice processes, and long term data analysis and records.
-
Surface Exchanges: Including the impacts of land use and land cover as well as Carbon Exchanges on Weather and Climate.
- Sensitivity of Regional Climate Due to Land-Cover Changes in the Eastern U.S. Since 1650
- Data fusion to determine North American sources and sinks of carbon dioxide at high spatial and temporal resolution from 2004 to 2008
- A global high-resolution fossil fuel CO2 inventory built from assimilation of in situ and remotely-sensed datasets to advance satellite greenhouse gas
- Future changes of the Southern Ocean CO2 fluxes
-
Clouds Precipitation, Snow and Ice processes: Including the observation and modeling of snow at high resolution needed to capture the observed variability.
- Hydrologic Research and Water Resources
- Design, development, evaluation, integration and deployment of new weather radar technology Quantitative precipitation estimation (QPE)
- Quantitative precipitation estimation (QPE)
- POES-GOES blended hydrometeorological products
- A Multisensor 4-D Blended Water Vapor Product for Weather Forecasting
- The Role of the Colorado Climate Center in a meaningful drought early warning system for the upper Colorado basin
- Linking Inuit Knowledge and Local-Scale Environmental Modeling to Evaluate the Impacts of Changing Weather on Human Activities at Clyde River, Nunavut
- Defining subgrid snow distributions within NASA remote-sensing products and models
- Quantifying the Source of Atmospheric Ice Nuclei from Biomass Burning Aerosols
- Weather and Climate System: Including the observation and modeling of snow at high resolution needed to capture the observed variability.
