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GFDL Research Highlights

July 1st, 2012 - Projected Response of an Endangered Marine Turtle Population to Climate Change

Assessing the potential impacts of climate change on individual species and populations is essential for the stewardship of ecosystems and biodiversity. Marine turtles must lay eggs in sandy beaches and thus climate change can affect both their marine and terrestrial habitat. The population of critically endangered eastern Pacific leatherback turtles (Dermochelys coriacea) nesting on the northwest coast of Costa Rica has been studied in terms of its sensitivity to contemporary climate variability in the nesting beach and ocean. Read More…

June 1st, 2012 - Model Precipitation Bias over the Southwestern Equatorial Indian Ocean

This study investigated the spatio-temporal features of the serious positive precipitation bias over the southwestern equatorial Indian Ocean, found in most current coupled and uncoupled general circulation models, and its links with the large scale monsoon circulation. The study attempted to answer two questions: Is there a common identifiable mechanism forcing the local bias? Does the local bias have an influence on the continental simulated monsoon precipitation? Read More…

May 18th, 2012 - An Integrated “End-To-End” Model For Climate-Fish Interactions

Climate impacts on marine ecosystems arise from a combination of direct influences of physical climate on organisms (e.g., temperature effects on metabolic process) and indirect effects controlled by interactions with directly affected organisms. Indirect influences may originate with primary producers (i.e., phytoplankton) and propagate upward from the bottom of the food web or with higher trophic levels (i.e., fish) and propagate downward. Elucidating and predicting the response of living marine resources to climate and fishing pressure thus requires movement toward models that resolve interactions spanning physics to fish in an integrated way. Read More…

May 4th, 2012 - Tropical Tropospheric-Only Responses to Absorbing Aerosols

An ongoing challenge in quantifying aerosols’ impact on the climate is determining an optimal way of calculating aerosols’ radiative forcing. For absorbing aerosols, in particular, studies have shown that a forcing calculation that does not include the tropospheric response to absorbing aerosol (instantaneous forcing) is a poor proxy for the change in global mean surface temperature caused by the aerosol. Read More…

April 27th, 2012 - Comparing Global Atmospheric Model Simulations of Tropical Convection

An intercomparison of global atmospheric model simulations of tropical convection has been presented and evaluated with available observations collected during the TWP-ICE field experiment. Short simulations initialized from the ECMWF analysis have been used to constrain model large-scale states and thus isolate model systematic biases originating from various physical parameterizations. With realistic thermodynamic and kinematic fields captured in various weather regimes (wet, dry, and break), model precipitation, cloud properties (LWC, IWC, cloud fraction), radiation, and vertical heating profiles respond accordingly in these regimes. Despite somewhat realistically simulated precipitation, there are substantial cloud property discrepancies among the models, which are mainly influenced by cloud and convective parameterizations. Read More…

April 20th, 2012 - Some counter-intuitive dependencies of tropical cyclone frequency on parameters in a GCM

High resolution global atmospheric models are becoming more credible tools for studying the effects of global warming on tropical cyclones, and we need to understand how those aspects of the models in which we have relatively low confidence affect the simulations. The goal of this research was to systematically explore and understand how some key parameters in this global atmospheric model affect the simulation of tropical cyclone frequency. Read More…

April 13th, 2012 - Using Relative Humidity as a State Variable in Climate Feedback Analysis

We often use feedback terminology to help us understand why models differ in their estimates of the magnitude of the surface temperature changes produced by a given change in the Earth’s energy balance, such as that due to an increase in carbon dioxide. But several lines of evidence have suggested that the methodology used to define these feedbacks is far from optimal, making the typical model’s behavior look more complicated than it really is. Our goal in this short note was to propose an alternative methodology that simplifies the analysis in several ways. Read More…

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