Middle Atmosphere Climate Modeling and the NOAA Climate Test Bed

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has formed the Climate Test Bed (CTB) to accelerate the transfer of research and development into improved NOAA operational climate forecasts, products, and applications. The CTB is designed to serve as a conduit between the operational, academic and research communities to accelerate the transition of scientific advances to improved NOAA climate forecast products and services. There are four programmatic priorities for improved climate prediction consisting of:

• Multi-Model Ensemble Prediction System • Climate Forecast System Improvements • Climate Forecast Products • Climate Reanalysis

spanning weather, intraseasonal, interannual, and multi-decadal timescales. The CTB must foster improvements in the Climate Forecast System (CFS) by accelerating the transition of the relevant process level advances in NCEP's weather prediction model (the Global Forecast System or GFS) to CFS, and by supporting targeted research and development by the science community. These advances must be integrated and fully validated in CFS. The CFS is a coupled ocean-land-atmosphere version of the operational GFS. Initial improvements were focused upon the ocean climatology and the ability of the model to replicate ENSO events. Current and future plans include a focus on the upper troposphere and the stratosphere. NCEP plans for the GFS to incorporate a limited chemistry package to improve the background conditions for air quality forecasts. In the CFS, it is hoped that the interaction of the chemistry, dynamics and radiation schemes will provide insight to climate change as manmade and natural influences are incorporated. We will present an evaluation of the upper troposphere and stratosphere in the latest CFS research model. The research community will then be asked to participate in the CTB so as to improve the CFS and by doing so improve the role of the middle atmosphere upon climate.