Funding Opportunities

In FY 2024, MAPP is soliciting proposals from early career researchers to foster innovative Earth System Modeling research in collaboration with NOAA. This award will support early-career scientists who have the potential to serve as research leaders and mentors to future scientists, and who are interested in focusing their research careers on Earth System Model development and application relevant to the NOAA mission. Applicants are expected to propose a research plan centered around topics prioritized by the MAPP program, which include: advancing climate and Earth system models to better simulate climate variability and change, improving multi-annual to decadal climate prediction systems and products, and multi-decadal projections; and applying Earth system models to better understand, predict, and project drought, extreme heat, sea level change, and marine ecosystems. Proposed work should be clearly related to the broader NOAA mission^,; CPO’s mission, including the societal challenges it has identified; and the mission of the collaborating NOAA institution selected by the applicant. It is anticipated that one proposal will be selected, and should focus on any of the MAPP research areas below:

1. Applying Earth system models to better understand, predict, monitor, and project drought, extreme heat, sea level change, and marine ecosystems.
2. Marine ecosystem simulation, prediction, and projection focused on applications to NOAA’s NMFS and/or Sanctuaries missions.
3. Process-based Earth System Model development
4. Climate and Earth system model diagnosis in support of next-generation model development
5. Advancing climate projections and projections products and services, and the attribution of extreme events in the context of NOAA’s attribution effort

In FY 2024, the MAPP program is soliciting proposals that address key issues in the representation of Earth system processes in CMIP6-era and developmental models to improve model fidelity. Proposals should focus on clearly-identified gaps in the existing MDTF software package, for example, for the following diagnostic development areas:

• Advancing the simulation of climate and weather extremes, particularly tropical and extratropical storms, mesoscale convective systems, and atmospheric rivers
• Benchmarking model processes that undergird the successful prediction of extreme events on subseasonal to seasonal timescales
• Characterization of the aerosol-indirect effect and its implications for climate sensitivity and climate projections
• Addressing model precipitation biases and how they drive key societal impacts such as floods, droughts, and wildfires
• Advancing diagnostics of stratosphere-troposphere coupling and associated modes of coupled variability
• Vanguard areas of Earth System Model development, where the availability of process-oriented diagnostics is currently limited, such as glacial processes and wetlands

In FY 2024, MAPP, in partnership with the NMFS Office of Science and Technology, solicits proposals to advance the regional implementations of MOM6 and to perform research that lays the groundwork for the application of regional modeling data to seasonal to multi-decadal prediction and projection products and services. Please see the CVP program solicitation Information Sheet for related research opportunities. Proposals can focus on one of two FY 2024 priority areas:

1. Advance methodologies for the prediction of Large Marine Ecosystems (LMEs), tackling key issues such as the applicability and utility of bias correction methods, developing and delivering diagnostics that can be used for process-level evaluation and benchmarking of models built for the prediction and projection of LMEs, experimenting with or analyzing model configurations that may help advance the representation of known sources of skill for seasonal to decadal LME prediction, and improving data assimilation processes and the use of applicable observational datasets for initialization. Proposals in this priority area do not need to use MOM6; however, research results should be generalizable and useful for the configuration of MOM6 in the regions described above, if not potentially directly applicable.
2. Accelerate the development of MOM6 configurations for any of the following LMEs: Northeast Pacific, Great Lakes, Pacific Islands, and Arctic Ocean. Projects may focus on one of these regions and may build on or leverage prior work. Proposal teams should operate in a co-development fashion with NOAA and include collaborators from OAR Laboratories and/or Cooperative Institutes, and NMFS Science Centers toward creating potentially durable regional modeling teams as part of the multi-Line Office CEFI effort. Projects may focus on development and analysis of MOM6 configurations including how well these configurations represent critical fisheries-oriented processes, and how that representation translates into prediction skill.