GC43C-1215
Do CMIP5 Climate Models Reproduce Observed Historical Trends in Temperature and Precipitation over the Continental United States?
Thursday, 17 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Jinny Lee1,2, Paul C Loikith1,3, Duane Edward Waliser1 and Kenneth Kunkel4, (1)NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, United States, (2)California State University Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States, (3)Portland State University, Portland, OR, United States, (4)Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites (CICS), North Carolina State University, and NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), Asheville, NC, United States
Abstract:
Monitoring trends in key climate variables, such as surface temperature and precipitation, is an integral part of the ongoing efforts of the United States National Climate Assessment (NCA). Positive trends in both temperature and precipitation have been observed over the 20th century over much of the Continental United States (CONUS), however projections of future trends are reliant on climate model simulations. In order to have confidence in future projections of temperature and precipitation, it is crucial to evaluate the ability of current state-of-the-art climate models to reproduce historical observed trends. Towards this goal, trends in surface temperature and precipitation obtained from the NOAA nClimDiv 5 km gridded station observation-based product are compared to the suite of CMIP5 historical simulations over the CONUS region. The Regional Climate Model Evaluation System (RCMES), an analysis tool which supports the NCA by providing access to data and tools for regional climate model validation, is used to provide the comparisons between the models and observation. NASA TRMM precipitation data and MERRA surface temperature data are included in part of the analysis to observe how well satellite data and reanalysis compares to nClimDiv station observation data.
