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NASA Downscaling ProjectA team of researchers from NASA Ames Research Center, Goddard Space Flight Center, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Marshall Space Flight Center, along with university partners at UCLA, conducted an investigation to explore whether downscaling coarse resolution global climate model (GCM) predictions might provide valid insights into the regional impacts sought by decision makers. Since the computational cost of running global models at high spatial resolution for any useful climate scale period is prohibitive, the hope for downscaling is that a coarse resolution GCM provides sufficiently accurate synoptic scale information for a regional climate model (RCM) to accurately develop fine scale features that represent the regional impacts of a changing climate. As a proxy for a prognostic climate forecast model, and so that ground truth in the form of satellite and in-situ observations could be used for evaluation, the MERRA and MERRA-2 reanalyses were used to drive the NU-WRF regional climate model and a GEOS-5 replay. This was performed at various resolutions that were at factors of 2 to 10 higher than the reanalysis forcing. A number of experiments were conducted that varied resolution, model parameterizations, and intermediate scale nudging, for simulations over the continental US during the period from 2000-2010. The results of these experiments were compared to observational datasets to evaluate the output.
Document ID
20170006916
Acquisition Source
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Document Type
Technical Publication (TP)
Authors
Ferraro, Robert
(Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech. Pasadena, CA, United States)
Waliser, Duane
(Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech. Pasadena, CA, United States)
Peters-Lidard, Christa
(NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, MD, United States)
Date Acquired
July 21, 2017
Publication Date
February 1, 2017
Subject Category
Meteorology And Climatology
Report/Patent Number
NASA/TP-2017-219579
Funding Number(s)
CONTRACT_GRANT: NNN12AA01C
WBS: WBS 929099.03.03.01.23
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Public Use Permitted.
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