UCAR/NCAR* Junior Faculty Forum on Future Scientific Directions 2007
* additional funding provided by NSF grant to CU (ATM: 032736 to Philippe Naveau and Caspar Ammann)
JULY 9-11, 2007
at NCAR's Center Green facility in Boulder, CO
The objective of this forum is to bring together junior faculty and members of NCAR's Early Career Scientists Assembly (ECSA) to discuss selected topics in the Geosciences. This forum is open to non-tenured faculty at U.S. universities with preference given to those within five years of their first professorial academic appointment. In addition to promoting scientific discussion, an intended goal of the forum is to encourage development of professional relationships between members of ECSA and UCAR institutions.
TOPICS:
Geophysical and statistical challenges in detection/attribution of regional climate change.
Session Chairs:
Caspar Ammann (NCAR-CGD)
Philippe Naveau (U Colorado/CNRS-LSCE)
As NCAR is evaluating its next generation Earth System Model with an eye on regional climate prediction, it is imperative that expertise in regional climate change evaluation is being developed. The ECSA-Junior Faculty Forums have the objective of addressing such next generation challenges by providing an opportunity to young scientists to prepare themselves through exposure to members of other relevant communities with which they would under normal circumstances not meet. Using the next challenge of regional climate prediction, we are proposing:
- to bring new young scientists from the geophysical and statistics communities together;
- to examine key geophysical problems and identifying future mathematical methods that help to describe, decompose, and project high-resolution climate time series at regional scales;
- to emphasize the need for systematic assessments of robustness of results and their inherent uncertainty through effective validation and model selection schemes.
The applications should not be limited to instrumental data but also include the directly comparable problems as arising in high resolution proxy reconstructions as well as numerical output from latest generation GCMs. Obviously, the seed for this workshop is founded in the necessities to improve detection and attribution of forced climate change and its separation from the natural background variability at regional scales.
Coupling terrestrial and atmospheric water dynamics to improve predictability in a changing environment.
Session Chairs:
Steve Lyon, (U. Arizona)
Francina Dominguez, (U. Arizona)
David Gochis, (NCAR-RAL)
The multi-scale nature of fluxes across the interface of the land-surface and atmosphere directly influences the predictability of the coupled land-atmosphere system. From a hydrological perspective, fluxes in existing modeling systems are often times greatly simplified by reducing climate to either a source (e.g., rainfall) or a sink (e.g., evapotranspiration) for the exchange of mass. Such simplifications can severely limit the predictability of terrestrial hydrology since climatic inputs in space and time can be related to the surface hydrologic state, particularly on larger spatial and temporal scales. Capturing the feedback between terrestrial and atmospheric water dynamics has been problematic within the atmospheric sciences as well. Due to the large spatial scales at which most atmospheric models operate, assumptions pertaining to how water (and, more specifically, soil moisture) redistributes across the landscape are often unrealistic. Several recent advances have been made in coupled hydrological-atmospheric modeling systems by incorporating improved terrestrial hydrologic dynamics in weather and climate models. Therefore this forum provides a timely opportunity to;
- outline state-of-the-art approaches in coupled land-surface/atmospheric modeling,
- determine the limitations of various approaches, and
- provide recommendations on new pathways forward.
Such cross-disciplinary efforts are particularly relevant to today’s young scientists who will set their sights on improving the prediction skill of models used to describe our environment