Three researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have received a 2007 U.S. Department of Energy award to support research efforts to improve climate models.
The scientists from CU-Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and NOAA's Earth System Research Lab will be allocated 2 million computer processor hours to build the first complete, 20th century database of global weather maps. The maps will depict weather conditions at every six hours, from Earth's surface to the level of the jet stream.
The award is one of 45 DOE Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment, or INCITE, awards announced today in Washington, D.C. The scientists are CIRES researchers Gilbert Compo and Prashant Sardeshmukh and NOAA's Jeffrey Whitaker.
Known as "The 20th Century Reanalysis Project," the effort will double the number of years for which a complete record of three-dimensional atmospheric climate data is available. The researchers will use the project to extend the atmospheric climate record to 1892 and recreate a climate database in increments of six hours for the full troposphere, or lowest six miles of the atmosphere.
The team will reconstruct the weather maps using surface pressure observations never before released to the climate community for Australia, Canada, Croatia, the United States, Hong Kong, Italy, Spain and 11 West African nations.
Since climate models are validated against the climate record, a longer record will provide greater opportunities for validating and improving the models, said Compo. Improved validation of the current generation of climate models will be useful for the upcoming Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change due to be released later this year, he said.
"We hope that this project will enable climate researchers to better address issues such as the range of natural variability of extreme events, including floods, droughts, hurricanes, tropical cyclones and cold waves," he said.
The daily climate datasets in use today extend back only to 1948, he said. As a result, climatologists have been unable to compare the patterns and severity of recent and projected climate changes with early-century extremes like the 1930s Dust Bowl. The project will provide new information about the conditions in which extreme climate events occurred early last century and about the climate variations that may have skewed past policy decisions, Compo said.
"Our data will enable modelers to rigorously evaluate past climate variations," Whitaker said. "This is critical for building confidence in model projections of regional changes and high-impact, extreme events."
The team also aims to reduce inconsistencies in the atmospheric climate record, which stem from differences in how and where atmospheric conditions are observed. Until the 1940s, weather and climate observations were taken primarily from Earth's surface. Subsequent measurements have been made by weather balloons, and since the 1970s, primarily satellite observations, the researchers said.
Discrepancies in data resulting from different observing methods have caused otherwise similar climate datasets to perform poorly in determining the variability of storm tracks as well as tropical and Antarctic climate variability, Compo said.