Land Processes in a High Resolution Community Climate Model with Sub-Grid Scale Parameterizations Final Report

Download or read book Land Processes in a High Resolution Community Climate Model with Sub-Grid Scale Parameterizations Final Report written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The characteristics of land important for climate are very heterogeneous, as are the key atmospheric inputs to land, i.e. precipitation and radiation. To adequately represent this heterogeneity, state-of-the-art climate models should represent atmospheric inputs to land, land properties, and the dynamical changes of land at the highest resolution accessible by climate models. The research funded under this project focused on the development of an alternative approach to this problem in which a sub-mesh is imposed on each atmospheric model grid square. This allows representation of the land climate dynamics at a higher resolution than that achievable in the global atmospheric models. The high spatial detail of the fine-mesh treatment provides not only a more accurate representation of land processes to the atmospheric model, but also the opportunity for direct downscaling of the surface climate. The proposed project continued the development and refinement of a high-resolution land surface model that is compatible for inclusion into the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Community Climate Model (CCM), a state-of-the-art atmospheric general circulation model (GCM) that is used for climate simulation and prediction.