Using Petascale Computing Capabilities to Address Climate Change Uncertainties

Donald J. Wuebbles, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Xin-Zhong Liang, Donald J. Wuebbles, Patrick Worley, Seth Olsen, Sheri Mickelson, Ryan Mokos, Ligang Chen, Shenjian Su, David Bailey, Andrew Mai, Cecile Hannay, James Edwards, Michael Levy, Allison Baker, John Truesdale, Patrick Callaghan, Adrianne Middleton, Jay Shollenberger, Yuxiang He, Chao Sun, David New, Zachary Zobel, Alice Bertini, Warren Strand Jr, Ilana Stern, Nan Rosenbloom, Susan Bates

This research aims to address key uncertainties associated with the numerical modeling of the Earth’s climate system and the ability to accurately analyze past and projected future changes in climate. One of those key uncertainties is associated with the climate sensitivity, the effect of external forcings (e.g., due to increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide and in other radiatively important atmospheric gases and particles) on globally averaged temperature after accounting for feedbacks in the climate system. This set of analyses will examine uncertainties associated with the representations of processes and interactions occurring between clouds, aerosols, and radiative transfer in these models and how these uncertainties influence the climate sensitivity.

The second set of objectives is aimed at a series of analyses to evaluate the model with different model dynamical cores and the effects of going to much higher horizontal and vertical resolution. Investigation of the effects of very high resolution (10-30 km horizontal resolution) in coupled climate models is motivated by the considerable evidence that increased resolution leads to better simulations both of transient small-scale activity, e.g. eddies and waves, and of large-scale features of the mean climate.

Studies will be based around the latest, most advanced versions of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM). A unique aspect of the project is coupling of CCSM with the newly built Cloud-Aerosol-Radiation (CAR) ensemble modeling system.

Wuebbles vignette, originally prepared for NSF

http://www.atmos.illinois.edu/people/wuebbles.html