Research - Incubator Projects

The TIIMES Institute engages programs of research at three levels:  Incubation, Facilitation and Coordination. 

The Incubator is a mechanism that gives an idea time to flourish with the use of various resources such as retreats, workshops, visiting scholars, international programs, strategic partnerships activities, reviews, proposals, and more. Incubation efforts may lead to the idea developing into a Strategic Initiative, Project, or Program.

Facilitation takes the form of community workshops that are tasked to exchange and discuss recent findings; assess the state-of-the-science; and formulate new directions in the form of a white paper. The Institute may provide limited research co-sponsorship; host and support students, post doctoral appointees, Faculty Fellows and NCAR Affiliate Scientists for these efforts. 

Coordination of integrative research programs includes the conduct of projects through application of substantial resources together with an emphasis on external participation and external co-leadership. 

In some instances there will be a progression over time from Incubation to Facilitation and Program Coordination, as appropriate.

Weather-Climate Interface (WCI)

A set of common and challenging problems--that we define as the weather-climate interface--have hindered both weather prediction and climate projections, and where the skills and interests of both communities are essential to their solution. The overarching goal of WCI activities is to enhance dialogue and forge alliances among investigators motivated by weather prediction and climate system research toward the benefit of both applications.

The Common Ground

Much of the public and policy concern with global change is how the intensity, frequency and location of high-impact weather events might evolve under the various global change scenarios. This concern is driven in large part by our current need to mitigate weather and climate disasters in both developed and developing nations and to improve decision making for agriculture, transportation, water management and other key sectors of the economy. Improving the simulation of these high impact events in weather and climate modeling is a key component of the response to these urgent needs of society.

The International and National Opportunities

Bridging the climate-weather interface is well suited to the NCAR role as an integrator and the ESSL goal of prediction across scales.  World Weather Research Program (WWRP) THORPEX and the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) have initiated planning for collaboration in this area.   A major strength of the ESSL Climate and Mesoscale divisions, this international impetus should be met by a strong response from NCAR, presenting an opportunity for international leadership at the forefront of weather-climate research.  The research opportunities abound for major collaborations within the academic community, and centers for climate modeling and operational weather prediction.

Researchers from NCAR and the U.S. academic community held an exploratory workshop organized by TIIMES during the summer of 2006.  They identified the need for increased understanding and improved prediction of tropical convection and the two-way interaction with the large-scales as a scientifically challenging problem well suited to the NSF research community.  Research at the Weather Climate Interface (WCI) will improve the predictive skill.  Fundamental questions include:

• What physical and dynamical processes limit our skill in predicting organized, coherent convection in the tropics and the extent to which predictions can be improved?
• Can we improve the treatment of tropical convection in numerical models, given that in the 40 years since inception of numerical weather prediction, the parameterization of convection and moist processes remains vexingly primitive, and skillful prediction remains correspondingly elusive?
• Will improvements in the representation of tropical convection correct biases in climate system models; lead to dramatic improvements in week two predictions of mid-latitude weather; and improve the skill of projected changes in the tropics under various climate change scenarios?
• To what extent are global prediction/projection improvements dependent upon the success of coupled atmosphere-ocean models to predict the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO)?

The NCAR – University Opportunity

The methods for advancement on these topics take advantage of NCAR’s broad strengths, especially in the Climate and Mesoscale divisions of ESSL, Earth Observing Laboratory (EOL) and Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL).  The university community exhibits strengths and interest in predictability studies and model-based diagnostics.  Activities of an NCAR–university effort should include:

• Super parameterization of convection in global models aided by petascale computing resources. 
• Nested 3-D high resolution grids within a global WRF model.
• Use of the WRF-based NCAR Regional Climate Model.
• Knowledge of physical relationships derived from theory, cloud resolving models and observations.
• Utilization of data sets from new satellites (e.g., A-TRAIN, CALYPSO, CLOUD-SAT).
• Collaboration with Water Cycle program efforts on the parameterization of continental convection.

Given modest additional resources at NCAR and in the relevant NSF grants programs, substantial progress on all of the above can be made over a period of three to five years.

Convective Parameterization

The Water Cycle Program has conducted research related to the Regional and Global water cycle since 2001 with university collaboration.  Using the diurnal cycle of precipitation as a focus, research has shown that current climate models do not accurately simulate the frequency, intensity,  and timing of summer time convection over continental regions.  Much of the reason for this error is in the poor simulation of propagating systems of convection in the lee of major mountain ranges by current convective parameterization schemes.  This error is reflected in the high degree of uncertainty of current climate model runs in these regions.

The goals of the Water Cycle program are:

1. To reduce this uncertainty through focused research on the mechanisms leading to propagating research, 
2. Testing and improving new parameterizations of convection that attempt to simulate this phenomenon,
3. Improve our understanding of the coupling between land surface, boundary layer and convective parameterizations in climate models.

The latter goal aims at examining whether the often tight coupling between precipitation and soil moisture in climate models is realistic, and its role in modulating and initiating propagating convection.

The Water Cycle Program will continue to focus on improving convective parameterizations in climate models, including the testing of various candidate schemes (including the new Moncreiff and Liu scheme developed under Water Cycle sponsorship) and continuation of the scientific interest group on convective parameterization.

Additional Information about recent Convective Parameterization research done at NCAR

Colorado Headwaters: Water Resources Component

TIIMES and ISSE will jointly conduct coordinated Water System research that will span predictions in the physical water cycle, water resources and societal impacts.  An umbrella program, “Societal, Water, the Atmosphere and Natural Systems” (SWANS), is currently emerging.  The first project, “Colorado Headwaters”, focuses on critical questions concerning the effect of climate change on snow processes in the western cordillera of North America.  It employs both high resolution models and observations, and addresses the resulting implications for water management and policy.  This five-year project is a major focus of the Water System program.  More generally, studies of hydrological extremes are a shared priority for TIIMES-ISSE research, including the study of floods and droughts in future climate scenarios and the fate of aquifers under stress from climate change and human exploitation.

Additional information | SWANS

Flying Leap for Nitrogen

The exploration of the carbon-climate interaction using uncoupled and fully coupled carbon system experiments lead to the 2000 "Flying Leap" carbon experiment (ucar communications | ucar news release | staff notes). It was an idealized, centennial climate change sensitivity experiment with a prognostic carbon model and full interactive physical climate. A similar study using the nitrogen-climate interactions is in the works, called the Flying Leap for Nitrogen.

The Community Climate System Model (CCSM) version CCSM4 will be released in FY08. One of the several improvements (e.g., the introduction of dynamic vegetation) will enable a new range of scientific questions to be asked, and answered including those related to complex interactions among biota, chemical processes, and the climate system. ESSL scientists from TIIMES - Biogeosciences (BGS) and Climate and Global Dynamics Division (CGD) - Terrestrial groups will work toward a fully coupled global nitrogen cycle in CCSM – this will offer a "flying leap" for nitrogen research. Additionally, all CCSM component model Working Groups are actively exploring scientific avenues for reducing systematic biases in the coupled simulation.