Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit, Gulf Coast CESU

archived

The objectives are to develop regional climate predictions for two 30-year long time periods. The first period is the recent past, spanning the period from 1971-2000. This period will be used as a control, with copious observations of climate variables (e.g. rainfall, ET) to verify model outputs and to serve as a baseline to systematically judge the impacts of an altered climate. The second time period will be 2041-2070, in the mid to late 21st century. This time period coincides with that of the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP) who argue that the climate change signal would be stable and robust by this time period. This is also a time horizon that is immediately relevant to resource management agencies in the study region. NARCCAP is using 6 regional climate models and 4 IPCC-AR4 AOGCM’s to derive an estimate of regional climate projections over North America at a horizontal resolution of approximately 50km. The USGS requires dynamical down-scaling at a horizontal resolution of ≈10km covering peninsular Florida and adjacent regions in the southeast from three of the four AOGCMs used in NARCCAP. In addition, the impact of Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) changes with respect to the external forcing of the increasing greenhouse gas concentration on the climate of the study region will be examined. The targeted outcome of these proposed model integrations are to provide assessments of: 1. Changes in precipitation and temperature patterns over Florida and the adjacent southeast; 2. Changes in the timing (i.e. the phenology) of the seasonal cycle; 3. Changes in frequency of derivative products like freeze/chill days, extreme heat days, frost days, wild fire threat; 4. Changes in mean regional circulation, precipitation, evapotranspiration, and surface temperature; 5. Assess the uncertainties in 1-4 that may be associated changes in greenhouse gas concentrations and/or LULC; 6. Assist USGS scientists in interpretation of model outputs.

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