Thursday, 26 January 2012: 9:30 AM
Regional Climate Change Across the Continental U.S. Projected From Downscaling IPCC AR5 Simulations
Room 350/351 (New Orleans Convention Center )
Projecting climate change scenarios to local scales is important for understanding and mitigating the effects of climate change on society and the environment. Many of the general circulation models (GCMs) that are participating in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) do not fully resolve regional-scale processes and therefore cannot capture local changes in temperature and precipitation extremes. We seek to project the GCM's large-scale climate change signal to the local scale using a regional climate model (RCM) by applying dynamical downscaling techniques. The RCM will be used to better understand the local changes of temperature and precipitation extremes that may result from a changing climate. Preliminary results from downscaling NASA/GISS ModelE2 simulations of the IPCC AR5 Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 6.0 scenario will be shown. The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model will be used as the RCM to downscale decadal time slices for ca. 2000 and ca. 2030 and illustrate potential changes in regional climate for the continental U.S. that are projected by ModelE2 and WRF under RCP6.0.
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