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GFDL Participation at United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP-21)

Presentation: Prediction of Weather and Climate Extremes

GFDL’s Director, V. “Ram” Ramaswamy will be joined by Michael Oppenheimer (Princeton University) and Berrien Moore (University of Oklahoma) in giving a presentation on “Prediction of Weather and Climate Extremes” at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP-21), in Paris. This presentation will highlight GFDL’s efforts to understand the causes of climate changes over the past decades to century, to project future change accounting for natural and human-influenced factors, and to develop numerical models for seamless predictions of weather and climate, including the forecasting of extremes. The lab’s goal is to deliver credible, trustworthy, and actionable information to decision-makers in a wide variety of sectors (e.g., agriculture, forestry, health, coastal, river and ecosystem management, infrastructural protection), enabling the assessment of climate impacts and formulation of actions to address the societal challenges of vulnerability, adaptation, and mitigation.

GFDL is advancing the understanding and prediction of weather and climate extremes through state-of-the-art numerical models of the Earth System. The research, products, and services encompass a range of problems and span the different time scales of interest as well as spatial scales ranging from global to regional. They include: intercontinental transport of aerosol pollutants which affect air quality, health, and climate; hurricane track and intensity affecting lives and property; global distributions of chlorophyll affecting marine productivity and ecosystems; and seasonal-to-decadal predictions of water including droughts and heat waves, storms, and Arctic sea-ice.

The “Prediction of Weather and Climate Extremes” session will include animations using NASA’s HyperWall and NOAA’s Science-on-a-Sphere. Professor Moore and Professor Oppenheimer will discuss some of the consequences and impacts of climate change. A question-and-answer session will conclude the event. This talk, scheduled for December 1st, will be one of several NOAA presentations at the State Department’s U.S. Center at the conference.

The 2015 Climate Change Conference will be held in Paris from November 30th to December 11th. It will be the 21st annual session of the Conference of the Parties to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 11th session of the Meeting of the Parties to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The conference objective is to achieve a binding and universal agreement on climate, from all the nations of the world.

Files from the presentation, “Prediction of Weather and Climate Extremes”, available for download:

PowerPoint Presentation by GFDL Director, V. “Ram” Ramaswamy

ANIMATIONS

Extinction Optical Depth by Aerosols in 2012

Global view of the aerosol column over different continents and oceans (Year “2012”). Dust (orange-red), sulfate (grey-white), black carbon and organic carbon (green), sea-salt (blue). Brighter color indicates stronger aerosol column loading. Date and time appear in the lower right-hand corner. Towards the end of this animation (approximately middle-to-end of October), the large dust emission from the Midwest and Hurricane Sandy are manifest. The model is nudged with large-sale winds from NCEP reanalyses. Emissions of dust and sea-salt are generated prognostically, while the emissions of other aerosols including anthropogenic carbonaceous and sulfate are prescribed from standard source datasets. The transport across continental and larger space scales has been compared against satellite, ground-based and other observations.

Extinction Optical Depth by Aerosols in 2012, India Centered

View of the aerosol column over South Asia (Year “2012”). Dust (orange-red), sulfate (grey-white), black carbon and organic carbon (green), sea-salt (blue). Brighter color indicates stronger aerosol column loading. Date and time appear in the lower right-hand corner. The model is nudged with large-sale winds from NCEP reanalyses. Emissions of dust and sea-salt are generated prognostically, while the emissions of other aerosols including anthropogenic carbonaceous and sulfate are prescribed from standard source datasets. The transport across continental and larger space scales has been compared against satellite, ground-based and other observations.

Extinction Optical Depth by Aerosols in 2012, East Asia and Australia + Dust Burden from West Africa

View of the aerosol column over South Asia (Year “2012”). Dust (orange-red), sulfate (grey-white), black carbon and organic carbon (green), sea-salt (blue). Brighter color indicates stronger aerosol column loading. Date and time appear in the lower right-hand corner. The model is nudged with large-sale winds from NCEP reanalyses. Emissions of dust and sea-salt are generated prognostically, while the emissions of other aerosols including anthropogenic carbonaceous and sulfate are prescribed from standard source datasets. The transport across continental and larger space scales has been compared against satellite, ground-based and other observations. Following this is a animation showing tagged sources of dust from all countries of West Africa. This allows one to determine the origin of dust at any given point. It was originally developed to find the origin of dust in Barbados and Cayenne, as well as in the Negev (Israel). For validation, isotopic ratios of Sr and Nd can be estimated (knowing their values in each sources) and compared with observations at the receptor site.

Global Surface Temperature

Global surface temperature projections from approximately 2040 to 2105. Emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols follow the RCP8.5 scenario. Bottom plot shows the global-mean surface temperature evolution.

GFDL High Resolution Forecast Low Ocean Resolution (HiFLOR) Prototype Seasonal Prediction Model

Global coupled atmosphere-ocean-land-ice model simulation of total columnar condensed water (clouds), a proxy for atmospheric circulation patterns leading to tropical (and extratropical) storms, with hurricane categories highlighted on a green-orange-red color scale below on the plot along with the highest wind speeds for the storms. In the early part of the calendar year, the storms are mostly in the southern hemisphere, and later in the calendar storms appear in the northern hemisphere.