Priority 4: Supporting and Conducting Regional-scale Investigations of Climate and Weather

The North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP)

Background

The North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP) is an international program that includes principal investigators from Canada and the UK. It aims to produce multiple high-resolution climate change scenarios for most of North America. This program will provide output to the climate analysis community for in-depth regional analyses of climate change. These analyses will benefit current research by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), among others. A total of four different coupled atmosphere-ocean global climate models (AOGCMs) will be used to provide boundary conditions for six different regional climate models, which will be run at 50km resolution for current conditions, as well as for the middle of the twenty-first century, based on the IPCC's SRES (Special Report on Emissions Scenarios) A2 (A2 refers to one of four scenario "families" of possible future emissions being explored by AR4 researchers.) High-resolution (50km) atmosphere-only global climate model runs will also be produced in this project to explore the uncertainties in future projects and scenarios based on different AOGCMs combined with different regional climate models.

Progress

This research project was initiated for the most part during FY2006. A multi-agency grant (NSF, NOAA, and the DOE) was obtained for the three-year-long project. Regional climate model runs have already been completed using the National Centers for Environmental Protection (NCEP) boundary conditions for 1980-2000. Analyses of these runs have begun, and preliminary results indicate that the six RCMs (regional climate models) accurately reproduce the observed climate for these years. Also, plans have been fashioned to convene a NARCCAP Users' Meeting in FY2007, to include climatologists interested in analyzing NARCCAP results in detail, climate impact researchers who wish to use the climate change scenarios, and regional climate modelers who will use the 50km RCM runs to provide initial and boundary conditions for running higher-resolution (e.g., 5km) simulations over smaller domains (i.e., sub-regions of North America).

Plans

During FY2007 analyses of the NCEP-driven runs will be completed, and a number of current and future climate simulations will be completed. Climate change scenarios will be produced from these runs and made available to climate change impacts researchers on a server at NCAR. Analyses of the future climate projects will also be developed. This project also contributes to research across other NCAR laboratories, with the involvement of Don Middleton (SCD) and Steve Sain (IMAGe). This research is supported by the National Science Foundation, NOAA, and the US Department of Energy.

For Further Information

SERE Annual Report