High-Resolution Decadal Climate Predictions of Coastal Regions in the US Northeast

The overall goal of this study is to simulate climate changes over the Northeast USA as essential element of an efficient regional earth system modeling framework. The USA Northeast is comprised of a diverse landscape that includes coastlines, farmland, large urban centers, fresh water bodies and complex eco-systems. Further, the climate in the region is strongly influenced by local interactions of this complex landscape and continental and decadal scale signals such as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and polar currents. In an attempt to investigate the long term- past, present and future climate in such complex region, a high resolution climate modeling system has been configured accompanied by a data analysis of climatic observations. The Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) Model is used in the study over the NE region at a resolution of 4 km to simulate the current climate and it is validated against observed datasets. One decade continued simulation was undertaken for the period of 2000-2010. The first simulation is forced by NCEP reanalysis and the second simulation is carried out using bias corrected CCSM data as boundary condition. Model monthly maximum temperature, minimum temperature, precipitation, snow cover, and cloud cover results are compared to station observations and gridded dataset identifying biases for seasonal prediction at coastal/inland and urban/farmland locations. Finally, climate conditions from model and data are correlated to sea surface temperatures and NAO indices.