NCAR divisions, institutes, and laboratories have identified many opportunities where building out from existing programs and integrating expertise across disciplines could accelerate scientific progress and provide new information to address societal needs. The following frontiers, ranked in priority order, are particularly compelling near-term opportunities for program enhancement.
Over the next one to five years, governments, corporations, foundations, advocacy groups, consulting firms, and science labs will be involved in many overlapping decision processes on adaptation and mitigation. We have two near-term opportunities for constructive engagement that build on our strengths in modeling and simulation and include cooperation with universities and other collaborators with complementary expertise.
The first is to use our newly developed Nested Regional Climate Model (NRCM) to provide very-high-resolution (4 km) predictions of climate change over the next 50 years for the United States and possibly other regions, to support consistent local, regional, and national adaptation planning. (An atmospheric resolution of about 150 km was considered high resolution until recently.) Such simulations would help a wide variety of users with assessing vulnerability and potential impacts and developing strategies to respond. The model holds great promise for investigating the relationship of climate change to hurricanes. It also offers many possibilities for exciting collaborations with the hydrological, ecological, and human health communities, especially if additional atmospheric chemistry is incorporated. Specific actions would include
Our second opportunity is to further develop and apply the Integrated Population-Economy-Technology-Science (iPETS) model to evaluate alternative climate change response strategies. This effort can provide fundamental insights about the coupling of human and natural systems. It can also provide useful information for national-scale decision makers on mitigation and adaptation through integrated analysis of the atmospheric, environmental, and economic consequences of different policy, economic, and technological choices. The use of this medium- scale tool could also inform and be informed by analyses using CCSM. NCAR's computing resources would enable a large number of experimental simulations on a very rapid timescale and would facilitate exploration of couplings to CCSM. We plan to
Water and water resources in many areas of the world are particularly sensitive to climate change. The water-limited regions such as the southwestern United States are a case in point. These regions are also experiencing rapid population growth and consequent competing demands for those limited water resources. As a result, water managers, western governors, and the general public are keenly interested in how the water cycle will change as the climate warms and what they might do to cope with such change. We see two topics as particularly important: (1) the potential that the mountain snowpack (the main water reservoir for the western United States) will decrease under climate change, changing the seasonal patterns of runoff and river flow; and (2) the threat of increasing drought under climate change and consequent societal vulnerability and response. To investigate these issues, we plan to
The resulting improvements to climate models and the inclusion of societal vulnerability and adaptation in model development and applications will benefit many other parts of the world, especially those with comparable vulnerabilities.
Effectively synthesizing multi-scale Earth and Sun system model output with measurements is at the core of much NCAR science. Observations are used to develop theories, confront model results, and, through assimilation techniques, adjust those results. Remote sensing from space now provides essential global-scale information on the atmosphere, and novel sensor networks are being developed that will provide new unique and dense observations, supplementing traditional observations. Model representation of difficult-to-observe processes can be improved by examining the mismatch between models and corresponding forecasts based on assimilation of observational data, particularly satellite observations and spectrally resolved images of the Sun and its magnetic field.
There is an emerging opportunity for NCAR to serve the community by developing and supporting numerical tools and strategies for integrating measurements and models. This process relies on new, flexible methods of data assimilation in which heterogeneous sets of physical measurements can be combined with geophysical models to both yield better predictions and detect model biases. This activity has two distinct benefits: models can augment the often-sparse coverage of observations, and high-resolution observations can diagnose strengths and weaknesses of a physical model and its supporting parameterizations. This frontier will also support new instrument design by providing a framework in which the community can assess the ability of novel observations to improve prediction or elucidate imperfectly understood physical processes. We plan to
NCAR's research, service, and educational activities involve extensive partnerships with individuals and institutions all over the world. Reliable and easy-to-use cyberinfrastructure (CI) is increasingly important to sustaining these collaborative endeavors. Continued advances in advanced grid-based technologies hold significant promise for accelerating scientific progress by making high-performance computing and analysis tools widely and easily available; permitting remote access to and use of scientific instruments; and greatly easing the flow of, access to, and storage of data and information. NCAR is deeply involved in supporting high-performance CI services and tools, observing systems, and atmospheric and related science and education. We are thus very well positioned for a leadership role in the development of advanced grids for scientific research and education. Our near-term objectives are to
Shifting the nation's energy portfolio toward renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar power, and biofuels, is a national priority. Atmospheric science has a role in developing these resources: important meteorological and climatic factors influence the amount of energy available from these sources, and renewable energy developments themselves can have climate and environmental impacts.
There are a number of atmospheric research frontiers of particular relevance. Improved understanding of the atmospheric boundary layer and the interaction of flow regimes with variable topography is crucial for developing wind resources. There is now widespread recognition that poor characterization of the atmospheric conditions in which wind turbines operate is hindering the development of their energy-generation potential: wind farms are under-producing by 15-20%, and turbines that are designed for a 20-year lifetime are failing in less than five years. The efficiency of future power grids can be substantially improved by using accurate and detailed short-term weather predictions to control renewable power generation systems. New sensors and weather prediction systems are needed for future grids that may include energy storage components. Finally, in the area of biofuels, cultivating new crops for scaled up production could significantly change land-use patterns, which, in turn, could negatively impact soil erosion, water resources, and regional climate. NCAR has significant expertise in all of these areas. We plan to