NASA’s past, current and potential future support in bringing climate projection information to the decision support level

Abstract:

It is common that we use global climate models or Earth system models to perform climate projection into the future. Because of the long integration time and the tremendous computing resources required for such a projection, the model resolution is typically not at a spatial scale fine enough for climate assessment or decision support purposes. A number of “downscaling technologies” have been developed over the years to bring the climate projection information to the local level for management and policy decision support purposes.

In the past couple of years, NASA supported a number of regional to local climate projection activities: NASA Climate Adaption Science Investigators focused on climate resilience at NASA center level, National Climate Assessment (NCA) Capacity Building focused on data sets and tools to support NCA, NCA Indicators focused on creating simple indicators specifically designed for decision support, Assessing the Fidelity of Dynamical Downscaling with the NASA Unifies-WRF Model focused on understanding the credibility of dynamical downscaling technique using a regional climate model. All of these projects have a component in creating or using downscaled climate information.

With the consequence of climate change beginning to emerge, there is a continuous need to better quantify the quality of downscaled climate projections. In this talk I will give an overview on NASA’s efforts to understand the various techniques, the limitations including the risks of using these techniques, and finally, I will provide a view on possible future researches in this area.