Wildland Fire R & D Collaboratory | WRF/ESMF Software Framework Development | Biogeosciences: CO2 Transport over Complex Terrain | Data Assimilation | The Integrated Study of Dynamics, Chemistry, Clouds and Radiation of the Upper Troposphere and Lower Stratosphere | Water Cycle Across Scales
NCAR Strategic Initiatives are cross-divisional, collaborative research projects. MMM Researchers currently lead or contribute to 6 NCAR Strategic Initiatives. They are:
Related Website: MMM Wildfire Research
Janice Coen, MMM Lead - This initiative is being carried out in collaboration with RAP, ACD, and ESIG with the goals to (1) Create a highly interactive international forum to exchange information on research and development associated with wildland fire, (2) Assess related R&D priorities and build advocacy for them, and (3) Accelerate the transfer of technology from research to operational communities.
John Michalakes, MMM Lead - MMM is leading this effort, in collaboration with SCD and NOAA/NCEP, to ensure that the Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) is compatible with WRF and to adapt and extend the existing WRF advanced software framework for use as an early testbed for the ESMF design.
Jielun Sun, MMM Lead - This initiative is a collaborative effort with CGD, ACD, ATD, RAP, and ASP. The goals include understanding the role of biological processes in the dynamics, chemistry, and evolution of the climate system on time scales from days to millennia. MMM's role in this initiative is focused on spatial heterogeneity studies to strengthen current experimental efforts on understanding horizontal transport of carbon dioxide in long-term carbon observations. In particular, MMM will investigate the nocturnal CO2 balance and correlations between CO2 transports and surface heterogeneity with an emphasis on complex terrain.
Chris Snyder and Jeff Anderson, MMM Leads - MMM is taking the leading role in this collaborative effort with CGD to (1) Create a community what will produce leading edge research on data assimilation, focus disparate NCAR efforts, and support operational efforts within and beyond NCAR, (2) Develop a software environment for data assimilation research and evaluation - the Data Assimilation Research Testbed - along with software for use in undergraduate and graduate education, and (3) Provide a mechanism for collaboration with selected university and government partners and an infrastructure for communicating research and application advances to a broad community.
Mary Barth, MMM Lead - The goal of the UTLS initiative is to plan and conduct integrated studies using the new HIAPER aircraft in conjunction with observations from the NASA A-Train satellites and with NCAR modeling tools. MMM will play an integral role in UTLS activities including contributions to field campaign planning, continued development of the mesoscale WRF-Chem and orographic wave cloud cirrus models, preparation of instrumentation for HIAPER, and participation in the HIAPER flight planning.
Mitch Moncrieff, MMM Lead - This collaborative effort with CGD, ACD, RAP, ASP, and ATD has as its goals (1) to understand how water vapor, precipitation, and land-surface hydrology interact across scales to define the hydrological cycle, and (2) to improve both large- and small-scale weather prediction and climate models. MMM's role specifically includes multiscale cloud-system continental simulations using the regional version of the nonhydrostatic global model (NGM) and analysis of the completed MM5 simulations, and the CSRM results. In addition, contributions will be made to IHOP aimed at: (a) setting its objectives into a larger-scale context (e.g., convective triggers for parameterization, closure methods), (b) collaboration with USWRP research regarding sequences of organized convection, (c) collaboration with CGD on analysis of the IHOP results and placing them in a large scale perspective, and (d) contributions to the national and international goals of water and energy research: National Water Cycle Program, the GEWEX Cloud System Study (GCSS), and TRMM.