Capacity Center for Climate & Weather Extremes

Overview

The Capacity Center for Climate and Weather Extremes (C3WE) advances our understanding of high-impact weather from sub-seasonal to climate timescales. We identify the multi-scale Earth system processes that drive high-impact weather and how these processes change on long timescales. C3WE advances and shares methods to create capacity for community investigations into weather-climate connections. We work with stakeholders to inspire and pursue new fundamental science questions and create usable and useful research outcomes.

Research

Process-Based Understanding

We develop and implement research frameworks based on observations and numerical models to understand the local-to-global Earth system process interactions that cause high-impact weather. This includes analyzing process representation in a hierarchy of WRF and MPAS experiments from the tropics to the mid-latitudes and from large-eddy to hydrostatic scales. We study processes that bring extreme rainfall, streamflow and coastal surge, wind, and drought and wildfire. In addition to identifying the key processes, our results inform community weather and climate model development.

Predictability on Sub-Seasonal to Seasonal Scales

Using operational and experimental sub-seasonal to seasonal (S2S) forecasting systems we quantify the S2S predictability of high-impact weather. We focus on US extreme and seasonal precipitation and streamflow, and identify the sources and scales of predictability. Specific forecasting systems are the seasonal-to-multiyear large ensemble using CESM2, the ECMWF integrated forecasting system, and experimental systems using MPAS informed by outputs from the research frameworks above.

Useable Science

We engage private industry and government entities to identify new fundamental science investigations into weather-climate-water connections and identify characteristics of usable and useful research. In addition to direct collaborations we engage with stakeholders broadly to identify opportunities for new, useful information arising from NCAR’s community models and datasets. This includes insurance, water resource planning, and climate-resilient construction.

Shareable Workflows

We develop and share workflows – including pre- and post-processing software for simulations and big data analysis tools – to create capacity for investigations into weather-climate connections. We create and share Jupyter notebooks using python, xarray, and Dask to analyze NCAR community model datasets efficiently.

People

If you are interested in learning more please contact James Done.