Supporting Regional Climate Variability Prediction through NCAR's NRCM Data Portal

The Nested Regional Climate Model (NRCM) combines the strengths of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and NCAR's Community Climate System Model (CCSM) into an instrument that will allow for fundamental progress on the understanding and prediction of regional climate variability and change. In particular, embedding WRF within CCSM allows scientists to resolve processes that occur at the regional scale, as well as the influence of those processes on the large-scale climate, thereby improving the fidelity of climate change simulations and their utility for local and regional planning.

This paper highlights the data discovery and access services maintained by the Research Data Archive (RDA) at NCAR to the NRCM data output. Presently, the output fields in this dataset collection consist of two- and three-dimensional arrays at three- and six-hourly intervals. A basic set of 3-D parameters is available on model pressure levels: relative humidity, temperature, wind components, geopotential height, and potential vorticity. Additional 2-D parameters are provided at the model surface or near-surface level, and potential vorticity fields are also provided on the 320 K and 345 K isentropic surfaces.

The collection currently includes data from the climate runs with regional model domain over the North Atlantic Ocean and USA. The simulation covers the periods 1995-2005, 2020-2030, and 2045-2055. Data are available as monthly time series files in NetCDF format, and can be downloaded directly from the RDA web interface using server supplied Wget scripts. Users may either select a collection of files from default lists or create refined lists based on user-specified constraints (i.e. temporal, spatial, and parameter searches).