MAPP Webinar Series: Long-term Climate Outlooks for North America: Understanding Models to Interpret Projections and Early Plans for CMIP6

The NOAA CPO Modeling, Analysis, Prediction, and Projections (MAPP) program will host a webinar on the topic of CMIP5 results for North American and CMIP6 plans, Tuesday, February 25. This webinar will discuss ongoing work analyzing CMIP5 20th century simulations and 21st century projections for North America. Talks will highlight ongoing activities of the NOAA CMIP5 Task Force, including work being done with the applications/user community and modeling centers. An update on the plans for CMIP6 will also be presented. The announcement is provided below; you are invited to remotely join the session.

ABSTRACTS:

Eric Maloney — The NOAA MAPP CMIP5 Task Force Process-Oriented Diagnostics Effort — Efforts are underway by the NOAA MAPP CMIP5 Task Force to develop process-oriented model diagnostics to explain why some models produce better simulations of weather, climate, and climate variability. This effort aims not only to inform model development, but also to aid the applications community in interpreting the results of CMIP models.  Examples of process-oriented diagnostics will be presented, including those relevant to simulating tropical convection and its variability. The talk will also discuss a couple of pilot projects between the task force and modeling centers designed to integrate more extensive process-level information into the diagnostics packages that inform model development.
 
Justin Sheffield — Highlights and Outstanding Questions from the NOAA CMIP5 Task Force Analysis of N. American Climate — The goal of the NOAA CMIP5 Task Force is to bring together scientists working on evaluating simulations of 20th century climate and the uncertainties in long-term predictions and projections of 21st century climate over North America. The Task Force has contributed a set of individual and overview papers to a recent special collection of the Journal of Climate on model evaluations and projections across a broad set of climate processes. These include basic surface climate variables, climate extremes, intra-seasonal to decadal variability and teleconnections, and regional climate processes such as the North American monsoon, Arctic sea ice, and tropical cyclones. Feedback on these results from national programs such as the National Climate Assessment (NCA) has instigated further analysis and review of the results, especially with respect to the qualitative and quantitative changes since CMIP3, and ongoing issues with model evaluation. This talk will summarize these results and provide examples of the highlights and outstanding issues. Examples of changes from CMIP3 to CMIP5 include shifts in the line between future wetting and drying in the Southwest, better representation of ENSO variability but not teleconnections, and better representation of precipitation extremes. The results will be published as a NOAA technical report that will form a foundational report for the NCA, and may be of particular interest to the community interested in the results from CMIP5 to address specific questions on climate impacts, adaptation and vulnerability that are of high interest.
 
Ron Stouffer — Preparing for Phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) — The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, CMIP, is a large climate community effort that seeks to better understand past, present and future climate changes arising from either natural, unforced variability or in response to changes in radiative forcing in a multi-model context. This understanding includes assessments of model performance during the historical period and quantifications of the causes of the spread in future projections. Idealized experiments are also used to increase understanding of the model responses. In addition to these long time scale responses, experiments are performed to investigate the predictability of the climate system on various time and space scales as well as making predictions from observed climate states.
CMIP has a long history and started in 1995. The third version of CMIP, CMIP3, was used in support of the IPCC 4th Assessment Report (AR4). CMIP5 was used in support of the recently released IPCC AR5. CMIP consists of a very large database of mainly climate model output which is produced through a set of specified integrations using a common data format. An important part of CMIP is to make the multi-model output publically available in a standardized format. The database is open to all scientific based inquiries.
 
After CMIP5 the modeling and user communities of the CMIP databasewere surveyed. Based on that survey and our experience, the framework for CMIP will be changed for CMIP6. The details are not finalized. What follows is our current thinking.
 
CMIP6 will be much more science driven with a focus on the World Climate Research Program’s six Grand Challenge questions plus important carbon questions. The CMIP Panel which in the past controlled the whole process and all of the details of CMIP, will now just oversee much of the process. The various model intercomparison projects (MIPs) will be responsible for designing and maintaining their part of CMIP6. The role of the Panel will be to approve the various MIP proposed experiments, help coordinate experiments with other MIPs and approve the variable lists to be archived. The Panel will also be responsible for the details of a small core set of common integrations called the DECK (Design, Evaluation, and Characterization of Klima).
 
The talk will provide additional details of the current proposal for CMIP6.