The Regional Climate Research Section

The Regional Climate Research Group aims to improve our understanding and predictions of high impact weather and climate for societal benefit. Through high-resolution regional climate modeling, our research focuses on both the statistics and underlying physical processes of high impact events and their relationship to climate variability and change. In our research we combine dynamical downscaling using traditional limited area regional modeling with exploration of the opportunities of utilizing variable resolution global modeling, and the development of new statistical approaches for downscaling, assessing extremes and supporting societal needs. Strong collaboration with industry and societal groups ensures our research is aligned with the needs of end users and provides support for our exploration of ways to incorporate high impact event information into decision-making. In a related effort we are developing new paradigms for communicating scientific results to non-scientists in a manner that enables them to make optimal use of this information in their own decision-making.

Vision

RCS is a new group that grew out of the frontier Nested Regional Climate Modeling program and became fully established in late 2012. Our vision is of an interdisciplinary group aimed at bring a range of physical, mathematical, and social science expertise to address leading problems in regional climate and high impact weather prediction. In executing this vision we are developing and will maintain leading edge research and development together with community leadership and support aimed at:

• Improved understanding, assessments, projections and predictions of regional climate and weather with emphasis on:
• The two-way effects of climate variability and change on high-impact weather and the societal consequences
• Providing improved capacity for community investigations of regional climate; and,
• Establishing new approaches to effective user communication.

In exercising this vision, RCS is contributing to all aspects of the NESL mission: Advancing the understanding of weather, climate, atmospheric composition and processes; providing support to the wider community; and, developing applications to the benefit of society.[1]

[1] = NESL Strategic Plan (2009)

Approach

Our approach involves a combination of:

• Strategic research
• Development and use of suitable tools, including:
  • Advanced climate modeling systems suitable for regional-scale simulation with a focus on the Nested Regional Climate Model (NRCM) and the model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS)
  • Hybrid statistical-dynamical approaches suitable to regional climate and high impact weather
  • Societal indices and specialized module approaches to assessing risk and impacts of importance to, e.g.: ecologists, industry, public planning experts, and society
• Working closely with societal and industry partners at both the research and development stages, and
• Providing and maintaining regional climate modeling systems for community use.

We recognize that there are many disciplines associated with regional climate and high-impact weather and that these are growing in complexity and areas of interest. Successful pursuit of our vision, therefore, requires a range of expertise and perspectives and our emphasis is placed primarily on interdisciplinary research in which participants from several disciplines are embedded together with common goals and daily interaction. To quote the National Academies (2004), interdisciplinary research is:

“a mode of research by teams or individuals that integrates information, data, techniques, tools, perspectives, concepts, and/or theories from two or more disciplines or bodies of specialized knowledge to advance fundamental understanding or to solve problems whose solutions are beyond the scope of a single discipline or area of research practice.”

This is different to multidisciplinary research where the work is compartmentalized within separated disciplinary individuals or teams. Here we are developing integrated physical-mathematical-social science research that merges disciplinary approaches and builds an RCS niche as a leader in interdisciplinary work at the intersection of weather extremes and regional climate.

We are achieving this interdisciplinary approach through attracting and maintaining core expertise of the highest order in selected disciplinary areas relevant to our research and development activities; these experts bring, and will further develop close working partnerships with external academic, societal and industry partners. Such an approach brings investigation of climate, weather, ecosystem, and society into a unified frame as a basis for pursuit of our ambitious research goals and contributions to new and novel research directions research and novel applications.

Structure

We are located in the MMM Division of NESL as this is the optimal environment for our research agenda, one that very much requires both understanding and capacity for simulating high-impact-weather processes across a multitude of scales. However, we intend to maintain and strengthen collaborations and interactions with other NCAR and UCAR groups, such as CGD, ACD, RAL Water Cycle, CISL, and the UCAR Communications Unit and SPARC.

A feature of the RCS is our relatively young staff. This was a conscious decision arising from dedicated regional climate research being a relatively new activity and our chosen interdisciplinary approach.

Our administrative structure is therefor based on a loose matrix approach in which each component has a high degree of autonomy in the way that they operate and each member is encouraged to develop their careers and take on responsibilities within a supportive network. This does occur within the constraints of the following requirements:

• An all-group contribution to major projects and simulations, and,
• Careful attention to delivering on commitments to NSF and our other sponsoring organizations.

• People
• Research Themes