Atmospher Sci & Global Chg
Staff Awards & Honors

June 2005

PNNL Scientist Lead Organizer for Workshop to Identify Future Steps for Next Generation of Regional Climate Modeling

Ruby Leung

PNNL scientist Ruby Leung was the lead organizer of the international, invitation-only Regional Climate Modeling workshop "Research Needs and Directions of Regional Climate Modeling Using WRF and CCSM" held March 22-23, in Boulder, Colorado. Bill Kuo, Phil Merilees, and Joe Tribbia, National Center for Atmospheric Research, were co-organizers of the workshop, which was sponsored by NCAR's Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology and Climate and Global Dynamics Divisions.

More than 60 scientists from the United States and across the world attended the workshop to discuss the future steps needed to advance the state of the science in regional climate modeling. Specifi cally, the attendees addressed the following core areas needed for achieving the development of the next generation community regional climate model:

• Define research needs for the development of a next generation regional climate model based on the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF) and Community Climate System Model (CCSM)
• Define upscaling and downscaling research that can be addressed by regional climate models
• Develop a plan of actions to meet the research needs.

Workshop participants strongly recommended:

1. development of a regional scale earth system model that includes coupling WRF with other earth system components such as ocean, sea ice, land surface hydrology, ecosystem, and chemistry; and
2. development of two-way coupling between WRF and CCSM to represent the upscaled effects of climate hot spots such as the Maritime Continent, the subtropical eastern boundary regime, and the monsoon regions where global climate models fail to simulate the complex processes due to feedback and scale interactions.

As follow-on to the meeting, a workshop summary will be prepared for submission to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, and a working group will be formed to develop a more detailed implementation plan. Ruby will lead the development of this new working group. She also currently leads the WRF Regional Climate Modeling Working Group.

For a list of the speakers and breakout sessions.