Climate downscaling for regional ecosystem modeling

The forest and wetlands ecosystems along the coasts of the Northern Gulf of Mexico, trying to recover from the devastations of hurricane Katrina, are faced with increased stress from the changing climate. In order to develop appropriate adaptation strategies, the forest management specialists are in need of relevant regional future climate projections at spatial scales that are meaningful. Climate models and global reanalysis datasets have provided long term climate simulations and reanalysis of past, present, and future climate change. The available IPCC AR4 climate assessments, even the already downscaled NARCCAP (The North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program) are still at spatial scales that are too coarse for some of the decision making needs of the Gulf Coast. With support from NASA, a selected IPCC AR4 model output and the NARCCAP downscaled product is going to be further downscaled using the weather research and forecasting (WRF) model to 10 km resolution for the coastal regions of Northern Gulf of Mexico. The downscaled climate will then be incorporated into LANDIS, a Decision Support Tool (DST) for forest ecosystems management, to investigate ecosystem changes under both past and future climate. A program overview will be presented at the conference, along with initial configurations of downscaling procedures.