Climate Processes in CMIP5: NOAA's CMIP5 Task Force; uses and applications of the CMIP5 dataset

NOAA's CMIP5 Task Force was established in November 2011 to bring together scientists working with CMIP5 data and funded by the NOAA Climate Program Office's Modeling, Analysis, Predictions, and Projections (MAPP) program. The 35-plus scientists in the Task Force work at NOAA, other U.S. agencies and laboratories, and in academia. Their work focuses on analysis of the CMIP5 data set for North America and the group has a number of accomplishments, including organizing and preparing a majority of contributions to a Special Collection of papers on CMIP5, appearing in the Journal of Climate and titled “North American Climate in CMIP5 Experiments.” More recently, the group has been focused on two major applications of their funded scientific work. One application involves an interaction with the National Climate Assessment on projections for North America, comparisons of CMIP3 and CMIP5 data, and other input useful for the Assessment. The other application, which is the focus of this session, constitutes an effort to utilize the CMIP5 data set for the development of process-based metrics that could inform model development at the national laboratories. This presentation will describe the Task Force, present its highlights and achievements, and introduce the process-based metrics topic.