John Abatzoglou

email: john.abatzoglou@dri.edu

Research

Fuel treatments for the next 20-50 years need to be planned with respect to future climate projections. Our project is to utilize and refine high-res daily weather and climate information to assess whether current fuel treatments will be able to withstand future changes in the timing and magnitude of extreme fire weather conditions.

Current work includes downscaling daily temp, rh, winds, precip to 8km resolution and to that of stations frequently utilized. We are developing a probabilistic model to assess future changes across multiple models.

We would be interested in comparing our statistical downscaled results to those of the dynamically downscaled models.

Significant findings thus far include large increases in the frequency and window length for extreme fire danger, particularly across the desert SW.

Sommer Abdel-Fattah

email: sommerab@gmail.com

I'm a researcher/post-doctoral fellow working with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) in Burlington Ontario. I'm interested in climate change trends, projections and impacts specifically in the Great Lakes Basin.

Research

I am currently working on a Risk Assessment for the impacts of climate change to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada. This includes researching past trends for various variables as well as future projections. The main goal of the research is describe climate change scenarios for the future and assess the risk of impacts to the Department.

The research plan includes gathering data on trends and projections, impacts, vulnerabilities and gaps and performing a nation wide risk assessment through expert collaboration. The NARCAPP data will serve as inputs for necessary trend and projection work. The significance of this research is that it will allow the department to understand current gaps in knowledge and build programs around these, as well as plan for future impacts to the Department.

Anil Acharya

email: acharya_anil@yahoo.com

Research

I am looking at the hydrologic impacts due to climate change (mainly for future periods). In my study, I am looking at the impacts of extreme precipitation events on hydrologic characteristics of watersheds in Las Vegas. I am utilizing the downscaled dataset to fulfill this objective. The downscaled data will be used to build the future climate scenarios and a suitable hydrologic model will be used to observe the likely impacts. The area is very small, so I prefer to use the dataset that is downscaled using some regional climate model or by any other statistical means.

Jafar Aghajanzadeh

email: sterioo@yahoo.com

I study water resource engineering at Shiraz Azad University.

Research

I'm working on my dissertation and it's about forecasting soil moisture for next 100 years. I need GCMs data for my locale to downscale it by dynamic method and find the best statistical model which can predict weather for purposes duration. After all I want to find a model to predict soil moisture considering weather forecasting.

Amir AghaKouchak

email: amir.a@uci.edu

Research
I am particularly interested in quantification of GCM and RCM uncertainties. Our plan is to use NARCCAP data along with other data sets to develop an uncertainty model. Furthermore, we will be using NARCCAP data to study how climate change might impact extreme precipitation events.

Kazi Ahmed

email: kfa09002@engr.uconn.edu

I am a PhD student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Connecticut.

Research

I am planning to use NARCCAP data to investigate the impact of bias correction of dynamically downscaled GCM outputs. I will perform the bias correction of temperature, precipitation and wind data of different GCM-RCM outputs and to find out if correcting the bias can increase their performance when they are used in hydrologic impact studies.

Sadik Ahmed

email: ahmeds86@mcmaster.ca

Research
My proposed research topic is "Climate Change Impact Assessment at Watershed Scale". The objective of my research is to assess climate change impact on hydrology of Spencer Creek Watershed located in Southern Ontario, Canada. I will use Hydrologic Engineering Center's Hydrologic Modeling System (HEC-HMS) for flow simulation and Hydrologic Engineering Center's River Analysis System (HEC- RAS) for determining inundation depth and extents.

NARCCAP precipitation and temperature data will be used as input into the HEC-HMS model for countinous and extreme event flow simulation. Expected outputs of the proposed research will be the information and knowledgebase on impact of climate change on the Spencer Creek Watershed. The research output will provide a broad picture of climate change impact at watershed scale and facilitate sustainable management of water resources.

Jay Alder

email: jay.alder@geo.oregonstate.edu
website: http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/alderj/

Graduate Student
Oregon State University

Interests:Climate modeling, GCMs, RegCM3, ENSO

Research

I'm working on a regional downscaling effort at Oregon State University using RegCM3. I am having trouble formatting our NetCDF output to be CF-1.0 compliant so that it properly imports into ArcGIS. I would like access to the NARCCAP output so I can have a working datasets to compare to. I think we'd benefit by being able to compare our 50km North America runs to those on NARCCAP.

Carlos Alean-Rocha

email: calean99@hotmail.com

PhD student at The Mexican Institute of Water Technology (IMTA). Sponsored by the Mexican National Water Commission.

Research

We are interested in nested Regional Climate Models (RCMs) as regionalization tools to provide climate information. We will use NARCCAP precipitation and temperature data to check the outputs of different coupled combinations between global and regional models to try to answer the question: "Among all combinations, which coupled models are perform best throughout the southern U.S. (i.e. South Atlantic States, East South Central States, and West South Central States) and northern Mexico?" We will use a probabilistic methodology to regionalize scenario data for precipitation and temperature throughout the frontier zone given by the set of CGCMs that participate in the Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Michael Alexander

email: Michael.Alexander@noaa.gov
website: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/people/michael.alexander/

Research
We are using NARCCAP data to study how climate change might impact heavy precipitation events during summer over the front range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. We are analyzing the daily precipitation values from NARCCAP and examining their distribution with a focus on the top 5% and 1% of events. Composites have also been constructed for the top 30 and how they differ from the present to the future under the A1B scenario. The conditions during the extreme events are also being used as boundary conditions for high resolution (1 km) WRF simulations over the front range. The latter experiments are being conducted by Kelly Mahoney a post doc in the PACE program.

Karim Alizad

email: kalizad@knights.ucf.edu

Research
These data is going to be used for a research project at UCF for climate change prediction and water rise in a specific place incorporating the current and future data.

Bob Allen

email: rjallen@ucr.edu

Research
Investigation of southern CA climate change, focusing on changes to the hydrological cycle.

Randall Alliss

email: randall.alliss@ngc.com

Dr. Randall J. Alliss
Manager, Atmospheric Effects
Northrop Grumman - TASC
4801 Stonecroft Blvd
Chantilly, VA 20151
703-633-8300x4002
703-449-3400 fax

We are generally interested in regional climate modeling and dynamical downscaling to study future climate impacts.

Research

Our research goals at the highest level include quantifying the impacts of future climate change on life and economy in the Mid-Atlantic States. We plan to use the NARCCAP data to investigate climate impacts over the Mid-Atlantic and Chesapeake Bay regions. We are specifically interested in understanding the impacts on agriculture and marine commerce. We will analyze the NARCCAP simulations of extreme heat, cold, and precipitation events for both the present climate and projected future climates. We will also investigate the impacts of sea-level rise on marine commerce in the Chesapeake Bay. We would like to also use the NARCCAP data to initialize high resolution runs using the WRF model in order to study local impacts. Our research should help to address these questions and to provide estimates of how future weather extremes will affect the economies of the Mid-Atlantic States.

We plan to utilize data from both the GFDL time-slice experiments as well as the NCEP driven runs.

Andrew Allstadt

email: allstadt@wisc.edu
website: http://silvis.forest.wisc.edu/people/Andrew-Allstadt

Postdoc at the University of Wisconsin Madison in the Department of Forestry and Wildlife Ecology.

Research

Our group is interested in the effects of extreme weather events (e.g., droughts, heat waves, cold snaps) on the abundance and distribution of bird species.

Noel Aloysius

email: noel.aloysius@yale.edu

Noel Aloysius is a second year doctoral student at Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He has a BS in Civil Engineering from the University of Peradeniya and a MS in Earth System Science and Policy from the University of North Dakota.

Prior to joining FES he held positions as an Instructor in Civil Engineering at University of Peradeniya, Design Engineer and Project Manager at an engineering consulting company in Sri Lanka, Water Resources Engineer at the International Water Management Institute, a not-for-profit international research organization headquartered in Sri Lanka, and Drought Assessment Project Manager at the Upper Midwest Aerospace Consortium in Grand Forks, North Dakota. His advisor is Professor James Saiers.

At FES his research focuses on the role of climate and land use change in the vulnerability and resilience of water resources in semi-arid and tropical river basins.

Research

The goal of my research is to examine the role of climate change and variability (CCV) and land use and land cover change (LULC)on the vulnerability and resilience of water resources in river basins with complex water infrastructure (e.g. dams) and ecosystem services (e.g. water for food and nature). The research will quantify the spatiotemporal variation of surface and groundwater resources and investigate the ecosystem services that are affected by water availability within the river basin. I will examine these issues by developing hydrological models for river basins which include the Lower Rio Grande in the United States and Mexico and the Congo in Africa. Specifically, the proposed research will seek to answer the following research questions:

1. What are the historical changes and variability in climate (temperature and precipitation) and the changes in land use and land cover and how these changes affected the basin water resources?
2. How much water is diverted to ecosystem services such as production of food and water supply for people?
3. How will basin hydrology change due to deforestation, logging concessions, agriculture expansion, and urban land use expansion?
4. What are the projected changes and variability in climate (precipitation and temperature) and how will this change the basin hydrology when combined with the changes in question 3? I will, specifically, address how the projected increase in the frequency of extreme events such as droughts will change the basin water availability in space and time.
5. How will the basin hydrology change with the inclusion of water infrastructure such as dams combined with changes in question 3 and 4?
6. What are the strategies required to improve the human welfare and ecosystem functioning while preserving the resilience of the system?

Answering these research questions require the use of hydrological models that define and simulate the required processes. These models have to be calibrated and validated before using them for inference. When a calibrated model is used to project future changes for a new set of land use and climate scenario, the projected changes inherit an increased uncertainty, because with the new scenario the boundary conditions (e.g. land use) have changed and so does the parameters associated with them. In order to fully understand the changes in the parameters, the model has to be validated with a new set of observed data resulted from the new boundary conditions. This is not plausible, especially for climate change impact studies. The following research question will help to address this issue,

• How will the model parameters (associated with the boundary conditions such as land use and climate) change for a set of different boundary conditions and their respective observed outcome? How can this information be used to address the uncertainties in future projections?

Caspar Ammann

email: ammann@ucar.edu

Research
A key component of the research includes the evaluation of downscaling capabilities and characterization of the high-resolution data in comparison to observations. This forms the foundation of local/regional applications. Secondly, I'm interested in asking science-informed questions about the applications and evaluate the observational and modeling design and tools for their usefulness towards these questions.
NARCCAP offers a fantastic matrix of cross-GCM/RCM combinations to study the downscaling capabilities and skills at this time. I'd like to apply these data for different uses in water-related applications (estimating stream flow, studying changes in seasonal cycle, ie. shifts) as well as their use in estimating potential in wind and solar alternative energy production. Finally, the NARCCAP distribution offers the diversity of data to study how consistent trends in indices of climate are across different model combinations.

Valentine Anantharaj

email: vga1@msstate.edu
website: http://www.gri.msstate.edu

For a profile please see:
http://www.gri.msstate.edu/about/dir_info.php?d=1597

Research

Project Title: Sustainable Management of Coastal Forest Ecosystems under a Changing Climate in the Northern Gulf of Mexico

The forest and wetlands ecosystems along the coasts of the Northern Gulf of Mexico, trying to recover from the devastations of hurricane Katrina, are faced with increased stress from the changing climate. In order to develop appropriate adaptation strategies, the forest management specialists are in need of relevant regional future climate projects at spatial scales that are meaningful. Climate models and global reanalysis datasets have provided long term climate simulations and reanalysis of past, present, and future climate change. The available IPCC AR4 climate assessments are at spatial scales that are too coarse for the decision making needs of the Gulf Coast. Hence, we propose to dynamically downscale selected simulations for regional climate projections. We will incorporate the downscaled scenarios into LANDIS, a Decision Support Tool (DST) for forest ecosystems management.

Our approach involves: (a) assessment of the continental scale simulations from the NARCCAP for use with LANDIS; (b) downscaling of a set of NARCCAP to 10x10 km2 resolutions; (c) simulating forests ecosystem changes under the projected regional climate using LANDIS; (d) generating and evaluating a suite of hypothetical forest management decisions for one IPCC emission scenarios; and (e) incorporate our results and products into the NOAA Ecosystems Data Assembly Center (EDAC) in order to make them available to a broader community stakeholders in the Gulf of Mexico Alliance (GOMA).

The focus of this study addresses the restoration and conservation of coastal wetlands and estuarine ecosystems priority issues.

Theresa Andersen

email: tkande@iastate.edu

Iowa State University

Research

Main research goals

• determine if climate models indicate any seasonal, diurnal, and multi-year trends in wind speeds
• determine if the model wind speed trends are similar to the observed
• motivated by research done by Pryor et al. where observed trends show wind speeds are generally decreasing across the US

Research methods

• ncdump data from netcdf files
• write fortran programs to extract data (particular hours and/or gridpoints)
• use ferret to plot data and analyze trends

Research plan
Currently analyzing MM5 wind speed data. Would like to expand the study to include the other NARCCAP models wind speed output

What data are needed
Surface wind speed data from RSM, and other levels and/or models if time permits.

Anticipated findings or significance of work
The models pick up the significant time history trends and seasonal trends; the models do not represent the diurnal trends well

Bob Anderson

email: bobanderson@permaloc.com
website: http://www.permaloc.com

Research

Improved source control methodology for urban storm water

Bruce T. Anderson

email: brucea@bu.edu

Bruce T. Anderson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at Boston University. He serves as a Research Consultant for the Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment (NECIA) project and heads the Experimental Center for Remote Observations of Production (ECROP). He has also served as the Associate Chair for the Department. He has been a Royal Society Visiting Fellow, a National Research Council Fellow and a NOAA Visiting Scientist Fellow. His research interests include: Regional impacts of climate variability; Large-scale and regional atmospheric dynamics and hydrology; Coupled ocean-atmosphere modes of variability; and Historic and future climate trends within observations and climate-simulation models. He received his Ph.D. from Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1998 and graduated with a B.S. in Physics from University of California, Santa Barbara in 1994.

Research

We plan on using the NARCCAP data to help identify and analyze non-linear behavior in the time evolution of climate parameters derived from global and regional climate change predictions. While many climate parameters — such as global and regional temperatures- show a quasi-linear response to changes in radiative forcing associated with increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, other parameters — such as water availability, heat indices and extreme event occurrences — may behave in more complex ways. We have developed a method for using spatio-temporal data from global and regional climate forecasts to identify whether they show non-linear time evolutions. These non-linear evolutions can include increasing/decreasing sensitivity with time, as well as "turning" points in which initial responses differ in both sign and magnitude from longer-term responses. Preliminary results from regional climate forecasts for the Northeastern US, as well as from global climate forecasts for the Western US, indicate a strong non-linear response in soil moisture, with initial increases in both regions, followed by substantial drops once CO2 concentrations reach twice pre-industrial levels. This type of information can subsequently be used for local and region mitigation and adaptation activities in response to global climate change.

We will also use the NARCCAP data to further investigate physical and socio-economic impacts that arise from regional climate variations resulting from increased greenhouse gas concentrations over the next century. Previous results have focused upon the summertime climate for the Northeastern US. In this region, overall summertime precipitation totals are expected to increase over the northern and southern portions of the domain but decrease across the central portions; heavy-rainfall events are expected to increase across almost the entire domain, both with respect to frequency as well as intensity. Increased evaporation combined with increased temperatures are also expected to significantly increase the daily maximum heat index for the region; in addition, the number of days with extremely high heat-index values are expected to increase by approximately 450% and for certain regions days with heat index values that reach 32.2°C (90°F) — the level of "extreme caution" —could occur approximately 40-50% of the time during summer. Future research will focus on refining these results using data derived from the NARCCAP. In addition, future work will examine similar hydrologic variations over the southwestern U.S., which is expected to be strongly and imminently impacted by anthropogenic-induced climate change. In these regions, the combination of warmer regional temperatures, recurrent drought, and increasing populations all point to future conflicts among water users.

Christopher J. Anderson

email: christopher.j.anderson@noaa.gov

Christopher J. Anderson is Lead Mesoscale Modeler at the NOAA/ESRL/GSD in Boulder, CO.

For the past 2 years, his primary task has been to manage all weather forecast demonstration projects within ESRL/GSD/FAB. These typically include forecasts of 1-day to 3-day lead time. An effort has been established to develop regional climate modeling techniques for assessments of extremes in precipitation. Also, connections have been established with the Western Water Assessment. Prior to Christophers work at NOAA/ESRL, he was employed at Iowa State University where he contributed to the Project to Intercompare Regional Climate Simulations and the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Project.

Research

1. Examination of warm season precipitation extremes including daily rates and water cycle dynamics.
2. Examination of Colorado River Basin variables that are critical to hydrological impacts, such as snow pack, run off, and summertime monsoon precipitation. Assess impacts by working with hydrologists and water managers.
3. Examination of winter time precipitation and snow pack in the Sierra Mountains.

Cristhian Andrade

email: cfa33@cornell.edu

Research
Intensity-Duration-Frequency curves -- their new behavior with climate change and the new impact on civil infrastructures.

Faron Anslow

email: fanslow@eos.ubc.ca

Post Doctoral Researcher at University of British Columbia

Research

Our research group is working on model simulations of glaciers across north america during the past 30 years (using NARR) and into the future hopefully using NARRCAP.

We will be looking at the surface energy balance of glaciers to determine surface mass balance and, consequently, their response to climate. To generate the surface energy balance we will be using surface and pressure-level variables of moisture, condensed species, radiation fluxes, temperature and pressure (roughly speaking).

We anticipate that, using a range of simulated future climate, we will be able to constrain the magnitude of ice volume loss (or gain) of North America over the next hundred years or so.

Richard Anyah

email: anyah@ucar.edu

Richard Anyah is a Research Associate in the Department of Environmental Sciences, Rutgers University and also currently a Visiting Scientist at NCAR, in MMM Division under the UCAR-Africa Initiative.

He got his Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science in Summer, 2005 from North Carolina State University under the direction of Prof. Fredrick Semazzi. He then moved to Rutgers University in Fall, 2005 as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Environmental Science and then became a Research Associate Scientist from Fall, 2006 the position he still holds to date. Currently he is also organizing a Regional Climate Modeling Inter-comparison Project for the Greater Horn of Africa (AFRMIP), which is partially funded by NSF.

Research

Richard's primary research focus has been on understanding land surface-atmospheric interactions and feedbacks and the coupled climate variability of the two intimately connected systems. In particular, he has been interested in studying the physical and dynamical mechanisms and role large inland freshwater lakes and high mountains plays on Eastern Africa Climate variability and change. He has used regional climate models as the primary investigative tool over the past several years.

At Rutgers he has also been in a broad interdisciplinary collaboration with a diverse group of scientists to study the impact of groundwater reservoir (water table dynamics) on the simulated hydroclimatic variability over North America

Therefore, his interests on NARCCAP are twofold:

1. Dynamical Dowscaling of NARCCAP RCM and time slice output over North America to investigate characteristic variability in the hydrological cycle and/or hydroclimatic conditions over North America and specific sub-regions.
2. As the PI of NSF-funded AFRMIP project he would also like to initiate interaction and collaboration not only with the PI.s of NARCCAP, but also NARCCAP users in order to learn useful organization lessons and challenges that could help in planning AFRMIP activities.

Miguel Arango

email: marango@ksu.edu

Research
In my research I am looking at the effect of future climate change scenarios on N2O emission from crops in Kansas. The future scenarios will be based on IPCC AB1 scenario. I am going to use DNDC model to predict N2O emission, and for that I need climatic data (precipitation and temperature) gather from NARCCAP. With that I would be able to test different management practices that could potentially reduce the emissions of N2O at regional level.

Shamarokh Arjumand

email: arjumas@mcmaster.ca

I am a first year graduate student of University of McMaster. I am mainly interested in climate change and hydrology. My research interest is climate change impact study on water resources.

Research

The aims of my study:

• To investigate the impact of climate change and variability on surface and groundwater flows for future period in Sixteen mile creek watershed, Ontario, Canada
• To analyze how the uncertainty of surface flows due to climate change interacts to the uncertainty of groundwater flows.
• Use hydrological model MIKE SHE /MIKE II after downscaling data (by SDSM) from Canadian Regional Climate model (CRCM).

Right now I would like to use NARCCAP data for a term project to learn to compare the downscaled result from regional model to observations (meteorological station is Toronto airport). My goal is to compare a few meteorological fields such as temperature, precipitation.

After completion my term project, I will start my master’s research to work with hydrological model.

yog aryal

email: yaryal@uwyo.edu

I am Grad Student at University of Wyoming. I am doing my MS is Civil Engineering and my concentration is in Water Resources.

Research

The globe has already witnessed the effect of climate change and availability of water has been the most focused area of research in recent decades. Owing to rise in water demand and looming climate change, the drought scenarios are becoming worse in recent years. Drought, a natural hazard, can be characterized by multiple climatologic and hydrological parameters. For the assessment of drought characteristics and mitigation measures, understanding of these parameters is very necessary.

Recently many climate models are developed and are being updated. In my MS thesis research I want to see the uncertainty associated with the models in predicting the future drought scenario in different representative climate locations across the United State. So I need climatologic and hydrological data for the analysis.

Toby Ault

email: toby.ault@cornell.edu

Asst. Prof., EAS, Cornell Univ.

Research

My main use of NARCCAP data will entail work to understand seasonal transitions (e.g., the "start of spring") in North America using phenolgically relevant variables.

Htay Aung

email: htayaung19@gmail.com

I am studying at Hiroshima University, Japan for Master Degree. In my research, I am going to carry out comparative analysis of the impact by hydrological dam on the watershed area.

Research

In my research, I have to find out the relationship of Forest Cover, and the water quality and amount of Hydro dam. Moreover, I have to do assessment on the impact of Hydro dam on downstream watershed area. I have to carry out comparative analysis among 2000, 2005 , 2009, 2013 something like that.

Diana Avila

email: dyemilet@gmail.com

Working at the National Institute of Forestry, Agricultural and Livestock Research (INIFAP) in northeastern Mexico. My line of research is forest fires.

Research

I want to develop an investigation to determine the distribution of forest fires under scenarios of climate change, scaled to the northeast region of Mexico. And I want to know the processes to develop or palicar models and data for smaller scale.

Meghna Babbar-Sebens

email: meghna@oregonstate.edu
website: http://cce.oregonstate.edu/people/faculty/babbar-sebens.html

Assistant Professor
School of Civil and Construction Engineering
Oregon State University
Rm. 211, Owen Hall Corvallis, OR, 97331

Research
The main goal of our research work is to investigate novel human-computer collaborative (HCC) approaches to plan and design for watershed problems under conditions of climate uncertainty. We use a combination of hydrologic models, optimization algorithms, visualization interfaces, etc. to develop the HCC approaches. The overall HCC framework helps stakeholders learn about how their watershed responds to various drivers (including climatic drivers) and search for optimized and adaptive plans to manage the watershed. We are interested in using the RCM downscaled predictions of precipitation, temperature, humidity, and wind speeds to forecast hydrologic responses of the watershed and assess the impact of various extreme event (e.g. floods) mitigation and adatation strategies. The work will help stakeholders use an integrated decision support framework to plan for the future, and help policy makers and agencies create adaptation strategies for their watersheds with the help of stakeholder collaborations.

Daniel Bader

email: dab2145@columbia.edu

Daniel Bader is a Programmer at the Center for Climate Systems Research at Columbia University. He works with Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig's Climate Impacts at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Presently, he is assisting the group with projects focusing on climate change impacts in New York City and New York State. In addition, he is working on projects that are exploring climate change impacts in the Southeastern United States and Central America.

Research

The Climate Impacts Group at NASA GISS is interested in NARCCAP output for several potential applications:

1. Drive further downscaling with the WRF-ARW model to the metropolitan level
2. Directly drive impact assessment models (of agriculture, energy, health, municipal applications, and/or water resource management)
3. Examine the sensitivity of large-scale circulation patterns to climate scenarios
4. Determine the statistics of extreme events in participating models
5. Evaluate the ensemble and member statistics to determine whether NARCCAP-like projects are justified for climate impact assessments in other regions of the world.

Mohammad Taha Bahadori

email: mohammab@usc.edu

Research
In my project we are aimed to model the spatial-temporal relationship of the extreme values. The motivation for this project stems from the observation that quite often the extreme events show a spatial-temporal dependencies. For a geologic example, after the three earthquakes [Chile (February 2010), Christchurch (February 2011) and Japan (March 2011)] on three corners of the Pacific Ocean, seismologists anticipate another big earthquake in the west coast of the North America.

For example, El Niño climate patterns which affect Pacific tropical regions in periods of several years and information bursts in social networks which propagate across the network.
In the first step of the research, we have modeled the extremes as GEV random processes with its location parameter capturing the spatial-temporal dependencies. Currently a linear model is considered for the location parameter to keep the model analytically tractable. We plan to continue this project by considering more complex models which capture more details while the model is still applicable to a broad range of applications. Efficient large scale optimization algorithms will also be developed to aid the inference process in the large datasets.
Prior work in this area mainly captures one of spatial or temporal effects and this work will be one of the first models to jointly capture spatial-temporal effects. Research in this field can also lead to better understanding of phenomena such as the Climate Change or dependency of stock market across the world.

Barry Baker

email: bbaker@tnc.org

Barry Baker, Ph.D. is currently working as ecosystem scientist for The Nature Conservancy's Climate Change Team. He received his doctorate from Colorado State University in 1991 where his research focused on the effects of climate change on grassland/livestock ecosystems. More recently he has been using climate and dynamic vegetation models to identify potential impacts of climate change on ecosystems in northwestern Yunnan China. In addition he is working with several universities, and national laboratories in the US to conduct regional-scale climate change vulnerability and impact analyses and incorporating results into conservation planning. His research interests include bioclimatology, biogeography, and terrestrial ecosystem modeling for predicting the impacts of climate change on biodiversity especially in grassland and high altitude ecosystems.

Research

Barry is collaborating with several vegetation modelling groups (SAGE, LPJ, MC1, and Century) to simulate impacts of climate change on terrestrial systems. He will be using the data provided by the NARCCAP as climate forcings for the various vegetation models. Results will be used to help guide conservation strategies and evaluate ecosystem processes.

Marc Baldo

email: mlb-narccap@admin.softhome.net
website: http://www.climatechangedss.com

Research
Our primary interest in the NARCCAP data is the ability to use the higher resolution to complement our existing CMIP3 downscaled data. We are working under a NOAA-Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project to combine weather service models with climate change in a web-based framework.

zhenhao bao

email: zhenhao_bao@yahoo.com

I got PhD in climatology in Tokyo Metropolitan University, and now am researching a project about regional climate variability, simulation, and forecast in Institute for Energy, Environment and Sustainable Communalities, University of Regina, Canada as a research associate. Research interesting is mainly in rainfall variability and regional flood/drought,and their association with atmosphere circulation anomalies.

Research

By studying and comparing observed data and modelling data, we will analyze regional climate characteristics in present and future, and understand which climate variables can be available to forecast in decade scales for present climate modelling.

Daniel Barandiaran

email: dbarandiaran@gmail.com

I am a Master's student at UC Santa Cruz, studying future climate impacts. Received Bachelor's from University of Northern Colorado in meteorology.

Research

My research will be looking at changes in water resources for the western U.S. I will be focusing on three river basins: the Columbia, the Colorado, and the Sacramento/San Joaquin. To assess any changes, I will be looking at snow depth, total runoff, total precipitation and temperature. I expect that snow cover will decrease for all river basins, and that the timing of peak runoff will shift to earlier in the year. This will have a significant effect on water resource management, and these changes need to be anticipated as much as possible to reduce the effect they will have on cities and agricultural interests in the western U.S.

Michael Barbachem

email: mbarb002@odu.edu

Research
I am interested in using the NARCCAP data to perform statistical downscaling of precipitation and temperature data for water supply planning in southeast Virginia. The data will be used to develop input datasets to (1) drive neural network models for several rivers serving as surface water supplies, and, (2) estimate changes in reservoir evaporation rates.

Sasha Baroiant

email: sasha@admenergy.com

Research
I measure the impacts of energy efficiency programs for several gas and electric utility companies and public utility commissions. Part of the work involves cost effectiveness comparisons between energy efficiency and generation. Accurate information regarding expected energy savings over the next ten to 20 years are needed for proper comparisons. I've been using TMY3 data in the past, but I am concerned that usage of TMY3 data results in underestimation of the summer air conditioning energy usage in certain parts of the country. I'm looking for an acceptable alternative to TMY3 - preferably derived from trending historical data.

Carl Barrette

email: carl.barrette@cen.ulava.ca

Research
The work we are presently undertaking is part of the general mandate of ArcticNet to produce four Integrated Regional Impact Studies (IRISes) dedicated to the consequences of changes on the society and ecosystems of the canadian Arctic and Subarctic. For each IRIS, a climate chapter is produced and a portion of this chapter focuses on future climate changes. We use climate model data, mainly minimum, maximum and mean air temperature, precipitations and wind speed, for current and future periods to compute climate change indicators that are relevant to various scientific aspects addressed in each IRIS.

Elaine Barrow

email: elaine.barrow@sasktel.net

I am an Adjunct Professor at University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, with expertise in climate scenario construction. PhD from the University of East Anglia, UK. Over 15 years experience in climate scenario construction, past member of IPCC-TGICA, past Principal Investigator for the Canadian Climate Impacts Scenarios project. Currently working with Prof. Dave Sauchyn and Dr. Jeannine-Marie St. Jacques on a project to construct scenarios of hydroclimate variability in the Prairies region.

Research

Shifts in the distribution of water resources have been identified as the major risk from climate change in the Prairies region. The major challenge from climate change in this region is not a shift in average climate, but rather the amplification of climate extremes and departures from average conditions - excessive moisture and drought. NARCCAP data will be used to analyse low-frequency hydroclimate variability over the South Saskatchewan, Missouri and Assiniboine River basins, with the aim of constructing hydroclimate scenarios for these regions which include a variability component. We wish to analyse results from several RCMs over this region.

Rebecca Barthelmie

email: rbarthel@indiana.edu

Research
My research goals at present are to work with NARCAP data to explore the potential changes in climate in the Midwest into the middle of the current century.

Samantha Basile

email: sjbasile@umich.edu

Graduate Student, Master of Engineering in Applied Climate
Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences
University of Michigan

Research

I plan to use NARCCAP data in a final research project for my Regional Scale Climate: Downscaling Techniques and Applications class. My project goal is to compare statistical and dynamical downscaling of predicted precipitation and temperature variables over New York State. I have chosen New York State for its topographic diversity, which includes several mountain ranges and the intersection of the Mohawk and Hudson River Valleys. The data I will be comparing with NARCCAP data is Maurer Bias Correction Spatial Disaggregation (BCSD) CMIP5 RCP 8.5 model data (with the possible inclusion of Maurer BCSD CMIP3 SRES A2 data for direct comparison to NARCCAP data). I will be using the climatological period between 2041 and 2070 broken into decadal intervals for compatibility with planning timescales. I will use NCAR Command Language in creating my project figures and I plan to include seasonally averaged spatial plots, time series plots, and spatial difference plots of my chosen vari ables.

Satish Bastola

email: sbastola@coaps.fsu.edu

Research
I am working on the development of river routing model for the assessment of climate change impact on hydrological processes.

Guzin Bayraksan

email: guzinb@sie.arizona.edu

Research
My research revolves around the nexus of water and energy. In particular, the project I am currently inquiring for relates to self-sustainability of a community in the northern part of Arizona. I have collected well samples and tested their water chemistry, which I am using to restrict the water that can be sent to differing demand nodes and help determine the amount of energy that can be created by the power plant node. The other demands are determined partly by the temperatures in the region on a monthly basis. What I am looking for is models that show possible future temperature scenarios that I can use as inputs into my model. I would like to then examine the impact of those different climate scenarios on the distribution of the water types to the demand nodes. I believe that this data will help to build a more robust model and show interesting results under differing weather circumstances. This project is funded by the National Science Foundatation.

Jordan Beamer

email: beamerj@onid.orst.edu
website: http://oregonstate.edu/gradwater/jordan-beamer

I am currently in my 3rd years of PhD program in Water Resources Civil Engineering from Oregon State University. My dissertation title is "Modeling of Freshwater Runoff into Prince William Sound".

Research

Currently adapting a snowmelt-runoff hydrologic model to estimate historic freshwater runoff into Prince William Sound and greater Gulf of Alaska. Once calibrated, the model will run in real time to forecast runoff using weather observations and short term forecasts. Model output will serve as a boundary condition for an ocean circulation model.

My next step is to run some test simulations using projected GCM data as the meteorological forcings, as many researchers and managers are interested in future projections of runoff from rain, glacier- and snow-melt into the Gulf of Alaska.

Eban Bean

email: beaneb@ecu.edu

I am an assistant professor at East Carolina University in the Engineering Department and Institute for Coastal Science and Policy (ICSP).

Research

My research focuses on urban stormwater management primarily. However, I am also interested in coastal plain hydrology and coastal water quality dynamics. I am interested in downscaled models of the SE US and anticipating effects on stormwater management practices in the context of design standards.

Ali Behrangi

email: ali.behrangi@jpl.nasa.gov

Research
Using NARCCAP data, I am interested in investigating precipitation characteristics and associated uncertainties. This includes a precipitation study using a combination of satellites, models and gauges. Moreover, I am interested in the assessment of climate change impacts on water resources with applications in decision making and adaptation strategies.

Kate Behrmank

email: behrmank@gmail.com

Research
I am working on understanding how biomass of switchgrass can be expected to change over time. This research uses a stochastic process-oriented to model, ALMANAC, to predict the biomass for current and future biomass. Several different climate scenarios will be analyzed across the easter United States. This work will help determine where long-term sustainable fields should be located to maximize biomass of switchgrass for biofuel production.

Ehsan Beigi

email: ebeigi3@tigers.lsu.edu

Research
I am looking to link the global circulation models (GCMs) to a downscaling dynamic model (such as mm5 or WRF) in order to build a regional climate model over Louisian State. Also, I am interested in comparing my own downscaled climate results with NARCCAP. Then, it is aimed to couple the output with hydrologic models to investigate impacts of climate change on water and groundwater resources.

Dino Bellugi

email: dinob@mit.edu
website: http://eapsweb.mit.edu/people/dinob

PhD in Earth Science and Computational Science and Engineering, University of California, Berkeley
Postdoctoral fellow, Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Science, MIT

Research

Research goals: understanding the shallow landsliding response of a landscape (i.e. abundance, location, and size of shallow landslides) to changes in intensity, duration, and frequency of extreme rainfall events, as may brought about by climate change.

Research methods and plan:

• Generate regional IDF rainfall statistics for different climate scenarios using multiple models.
• Compare across models and to historic values.
• Couple a mechanistic, 3-dimensional slope stability model with a novel search algorithm to predict discrete landslides.
• Apply landslide prediction procedure with the diverse rainfall triggering scenarios.
• Compare to historical landslide inventories.

Anticipated findings: Change in the abundance, location, and size of shallow landslides

Soumaya Belmecheri

email: sub30@psu.edu

Research

The aim of my research is to investigate behavioral response and management decisions by farmers in Pennsylvania, especially two group of growers: fruit and wine growers. In the climate projections i will use a simple analysis to depict one 'normal' temperature year, one cold, and one warm in the future. The strategy of the 'normal' year is to depict a likely growing season in the future analogous to one anomalous year in the past 10-20 years. These 3 future temperature scenario years will be used to run model to predict pests and insect phenology. The idea is to propose these scenarios to growers and ask them to report their management decision (spraying, etc.). I am looking at hourly data of temperature, precipitation, pressure, RH and solar radiation.

Ed Bensman

email: ebensman@nd.edu
website: http://crc.nd.edu

My name is Ed Bensman. I hold a Ph.D. in meteorology from Florida State University (2000) under the direction of Prof. T.N. Krishnamurti. My professional interests are in Numerical Weather Prediction from planetary (climate) scale to mesoscale phenomena. I am currently with the Center for Research Computing at the University of Notre Dame. I have a number of colleagues here who are interested in climate simulations for the purposes of: migration of aquatic and terrestrial invasive species; largely over the Great Lakes region of the U.S. I am also working with other investigators evaluating the role of climate change on malaria control and eradication over the Lake Victoria region of Africa and in Indonesia; both of which are obviously outside the domain of NARCCAP. I was not familiar with NARCCAP until I read about it on the ESG web page. My research interest is described below.

Research

My specific interest in the NARCCAP data is two-fold: one as a teaching tool for multi-disciplinary researchers interested in regional climate change and also as a . Without the benefit of evaluating the NARCCAP data I cannot fully comment on its utility. I can however speculate that these data might fulfill the needs of investigators to the point that it is unnecessary for me to perform similar regional climate simulations, forced from a global model, over the Great Lakes region. My short term interest is in evaluating the utility of these NARCCAP data for investigators locally. My longer term goal is regional climate modeling over the Great Lakes region using the new WRF3.0 nested regional climate modeling capability.

Robert Beyer

email: rdbeyer@iastate.edu

Iowa State University

Research

Main Research Goals:

Compare the dew formation and dissipation data output by RCMs against observational data to investigate end-user usefulness-especially with regard to agriculture and food security.

Research Methods:

Conduct comparative studies between RCM output and observational data to assess the temporal and spatial precision and accuracy of RCMs with regard to dew formation and dissipation. Furthermore, this information will permit deeper investigation of RCM to observational disparities such that RCM improvements will become beneficial to the end-user.

Research Plan:

1. Investigate the ability of RCMs to replicate/generate surface wetness data.
2. Conduct statistical analysis of model outputs against observational data to assess the temporal and spatial precision and accuracy of RCMs.
3. Investigate RCM bias with regard to dew formation and dissipation.
4. Report the findings of this investigation to appropriate publications for dissemination.

Data Needed:

All biogeophysical variables that affect the formation and dissipation of dew.

Anticipated Findings or Significance:

This research will investigate RCMs' treatment of dew formation and dissipation with the intention to improve RCM projections and data products for end-user application-in this particular case, agriculture.

Uma Bhatt

email: usbhatt@alaska.edu

I am writing a proposal to investigate downscaled variables in Alaska. We have performed a CCSM downscaled run from 1980-2100, but I would like some other information to provide some error analysis. I am interested in interior Alaska and from looking at your domain, I think it should be in there albeit at the boundary.

Research

See above. It would help my analysis to have multiple downscaled sets over Interior Alaska to help planners prepare for the future. We have one simulation based on AR5 but including the rich array of runs you have produced would strengthen our proposed project.

Rashi Bhushan

email: rashi345@gmail.com

I am a civil engineering graduate student doing research on climate change impacts on water resources.

Research

Main research goals: To study impacts of climate change and variability on water resources around the world.

Research methods: Multi-Objective optimisation modeling to assess the performance of various water supply options, Deamand forecast modeling, stochastics.

Research plan: We propose to address the issue of water supply scarcity and uncertainty in coastal cities by combining the supplies of reservoir water and water from desalination. Desalination though a reliable source of water for coastal cities has high-energy use, making it an expensive option. Reservoir water on the other hand, is cheaper due to its relatively small cost of transportation to the cities, but is often limited and variable in its availability. We observe that combining the operation of a desalination plant with a water supply reservoir leads to more cost efficient and reliable water production than if both were to be operated separately.

What data are needed: We want Regional climate model (RCM) data for precipitation and temperatures on daily/monthly scales to model the streams'/watersheds' response to climate change.

Anticipated findings or significance of work: We want to model a joint reservoir-desalination system as a multi-objective optimization problem with risk, resilience, and vulnerability as the objective functions, and cost as a constraint. From the tradeoff curve of the 3, we would derive insights into the potential of seawater desalination as a means of managing uncertainty.

Michela Biasutti

email: biasutti@ldeo.columbia.edu
website: http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~biasutti/

I am a researcher at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University.

Research

At this point, I intend to analyze the regional model climate change simulations to look at seasonal changes in mean temperature and precipitation and of daily extremes (heat waves, heavy rainfall, and the like) in the Southeast US. For this work I expect to use only surface temperature, precipitation and dew point.

In the future, I would be interested in looking into more details at the inter-model differences due to the GCM driver versus due to the actual RCM. For this work I would expect that I will need more variables, related both to circulation and to the details of convective rainfall.

Melissa Biegenwald

email: Melissa.Biegenwald@usace.army.mil

Research
The Corps is doing a research study on potential climate change impacts on flooding of the Red River of the North. The Corps proposal is to enter NARCCAP and evaluate how magnitude and timing of flooding at Fargo, ND, might change. All large historic floods have been a combination of snowmelt and precipitation and one goal is to see how the climate data performs for that type of flood.

Santiago Bisso Urrutigoity

email: bissourrutig@wisc.edu

Industrial and Systems Engineering senior student at University of Wisconsin-Madison

Research

I'll use the NARCCAP data to run a building modelling framework, called Back of the Envelope calculator, which is a simplified version of eQuest. I'll need the seasonal average for 2043 for the variables tas, huss, and ps.

The goal of the project is to address the impact of climate change on UW-Madison's Campus energy consumption and economics.

Rasel Biswas

email: rasel200109@yahoo.com

Research
I intend to analize the climate data, expert input, and the extreme precipitation for the St. John's, NL, Canada area. I am interested in the impact of climate change and adaptation to the climate effect to life in NL.

Amanda Black

email: asblack@iastate.edu

I am a graduate student at Iowa State University in Ames, IA. My field of study is meteorology.

Research

The main research goal that I am involved with is evaluating uncertainty in modeled crop yields through different sets of climate/crop simulations. My job will be to extract NARCCAP data and get it into usable format for other research groups.

Brian Blanton

email: brian_blanton@renci.org

Senior Scientist, Oceanographer
Renaissance Computing Institute
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Research

North Carolina's coastal region is impacted by several severe extratropical storms each year, and by a hurricane about once every three years. These events cause substantial damage to the coastal infrastructure through nearshore wind and wave action on barrier islands (erosion) and inland flooding due to storm surge and precipitation. The risks associated with living in the coastal zone are expected to increase over the next century in response to changing climate and the concomitant sea level rise.

A group of coastal oceanographers, geologists, and engineers have formed to initiate studies on the North Carolina coast, using high-resolution (finite element) storm surge and waves models, long-term shoreline modeling techniques, and regional implementations of the WRF model. We plan to further downscale regional climate model results to the southeast US coast, at sufficient resolution to support tropical cyclone development and evolution. We will need output from the regional future climate simulations provided through NARCCAP to drive our sub-regional modeling system, and also to establish the current climate response to the North Carolina region.

Our primary research goals over the next several years are to understand North Carolina's changing risk given prescription of future climates, and particularly in terms of changes in wind, wave, and storm surge extremes, frequency and intensity of tropical and extratropical systems, and coastal vulnerability. We plan on developing data sets that describe these coastal hazards and their evolution under future climate scenarios.

Max Bleiweiss

email: mbleiwei@taipan.nmsu.edu

Research
Climate change assessments for the southern rocky mountains and us mexico border region.

We have been conducting field and greenhouse research since 1988. Research has included field evaluations of candidate herbicides for use in chile pepper, onion, cotton, grain sorghum, corn, and pecans; determination of the economic benefit of herbicides and cultivation for weed management in chile pepper; effect of weeds on yield and quality of chile pepper; and growth characteristics of some of the problem weeds found in southern New Mexico production systems. The research has defined the problems that weeds pose in production agriculture in New Mexico and has provided information concerning the effectiveness of herbicides in our soils and under our environmental conditions. Annual reports from 1988 through 2009 have been scanned and posted on the EPWS website.

David Blodgett

email: dblodgett@usgs.gov
website: http://cida.usgs.gov/

Dave is the point of contact for climate change modelers needing access to NARCCAP within the USGS. He is responsible for requirements and use case development for development of tool in development at the USGS Center for Integrated Data Analytics (CIDA) at the Wisconsin Water Science Center in Middleton, WI.

Research

Various projects will be accessing data via tools being developed at CIDA. This summary will be updated as they become available.

Klaus Blümel

email: Klaus.Bluemel@agrar.hu-berlin.de
website: http://www.agrar.hu-berlin.de/agrarmet

Humboldt-University of Berlin
Faculty of Agriculture and Horticulture
Division of Agronomy and Crop Production
Professorship of Agricultural Climatology
Albrecht-Thaer Weg 5
D-14195 Berlin

Phone: ++49 (30) 3147 1222 / Fax: ++49 (30) 3147 1211

Research

Influence of climate change on apple trees; phenology, SVAT-modelling

The overall objective of the project CHARIKO is to investigate the possible regional impacts of climate change on fruit-growing in Germany, especially in the province Hessen. The main fruit growing regions in Germany are likely to be impacted differently by climate change and therefore these regions will be vulnerable to the impact of climate change in a varying degree. The CHARIKO project intends to develop application- relevant strategies for adaptation and evaluate the impact of these adaptation measures on the sectors profitability and productivity. In this context, different levels of adaptation will be considered. This project should help to maintain the competitiveness and profitability of fruit growing in Germany. In this way, the project contributes to the sustainable development of this economic sector. This is seen as relevant for the impact of fruit growing on land-use, as well as a guarantee to keep employment and a stable income level in this economic sector.

Earlier research has shown that the first impact of climate change on certain fruit species can already be observed. For example, since the end of the 1980's the blossoming of fruit trees in Germany has advanced by several days. The general growing season in Europe and Germany has been extended by 10 days during the last decades. Because of the earlier blossoming of trees, in some regions of Europe the risk of late frost damages has increased. Likewise, the number of pest populations in orchards has risen, e.g. the occurrence of the codling moth.

To assess the future damages on fruit-growing caused by climate change we will use some SVAT-, fruit growing- and phenological models. These models will be feeded with input data from different RCM-scenario runs.

Ethan Bodnaruk

email: ebodnaruk@gmail.com

Research
I will be using NARCCAP weather data combined with tree cover data in conjunction with iTree Hyrdo to compare future water balance scenarios with the current scenarios.

Leon Boegman

email: leon.boegman@civil.queensu.ca
website: http://www.civil.queensu.ca/Research/Hydrotechnical/Leon-Boegman/

I'm a professor in civil engineering at Queen's. I conduct research on physical processes and water quality in lakes.

Research

I have a project to drive a Lake Winnipeg hydrodynamics and eutrophication model with output from the CRCM to investigate the impacts of climate change on lake water quality. This is in collaboration with Ram Yerubandi at Environment Canada [Burlington]. I need access to daily or sub daily wind speed and direction, solar radiation (short and long wave), relative humidity, precipitation and air temperature data. This will be used to drive the lake model.

Celine Bonfils

email: bonfils2@llnl.gov

I work at PCMDI (LLNL) with Ben Santer, Tom Phillips and Dean Williams. The heart of my research is the investigation of the nature and causes of regional climate change using global climate models simulations and observational records. My research interests include the evaluation of climate model performance, the detection of anthropogenic influence on temperature changes in western United States, the role of expanding irrigated lands on regional climate, the examination of the nature and definition of low-frequency climate modes of variability, and the mechanisms that can trigger abrupt climate changes in the future.

Research

I am interested in the mechanisms that can trigger future abrupt climate change. In particular, I am studying mega-droughts in the southwest of North America, with an emphasis on the role of subsurface. For this project, I need to find first drought-conducive sea surface temperatures. These SSTs will be used to forced the CCSM3 model to provide lateral boundary condition to the regional model WRF. I will be using CCSM3.0 control run, 20c3m run and the A1b simulations performed with T42 CCSM3.0. Some of these data are dedicated to NARCCAP members. This study should help us to understand what are the mechanisms that can increase the likelihood of mega-drought occurrence in the Southwest.

Marcus Borengasser

email: mborengasser@eqm.com

Senior Image Analyst
Environmental Quality Management
2772 Harbor City Blvd.
Melbourne, FL 32935
(321) 242-6336

Research

We have been awarded a Phase I STTR by the Army Research Office/Corp of Engineers. The goal of the project is to develop an analytical method to evaluate and track the impact of climate change on pollutants generated by DoD operations. The resulting analytical tool will help decision makers determine the effects of potential climate change on the fate and transport of toxic compounds in the environment. This tool would help identify the causal patterns and the interventions that could mitigate the effects of climate change factors on contaminant fate and transport. The analytical tool would be hosted by a geographic information system containing layered information on the specific source and environmental conditions at priority military installations around the world. We hope to use NARCCAP data for the climate change portion of the project.

Jared Bowden

email: bowden.jared@epa.gov

PhD. Atmospheric Science; North Carolina State University

Worked with Fred Semazzi performing dynamical downscaling over the Greater Horn of Africa. Currently NRC Postdoc at the EPA helping to serve as a source for climate related issues and perform regional climate model simulations.

109 T.W. Alexander Drive
National Exposure Research Laboratory, E243-01
Research Triangle Park, NC 27711
phone: 919-541-5258

Research

This data will help to provide a means of determining the uncertainty for our downscaled climate change simulations. Also, the data will help to characterize the risk for certain impacts, such as air quality.

Sinue Bravo

email: Ing.Benjamin.Bravo@hotmail.com

Research
Research of Climate changes from the area of North America, specifically Mexico, applied into a model to future predictions, amount of rain in large periods of time and regions in which is little rain or is much.

Shane Brennan

email: sbren006@odu.edu

Research
I aim to utilize NARCCAP data to create models to predict effects of global climate change on local areas.

Justin Briggs

email: justin.briggs@noaa.gov

I'm a Berkeley physics grad working at NOAA.

Research

Main Research Goals: Optimize our ability to predict flows in the Upper Colorado River Basin (UCRB). Evaluate the theoretical basis for the bias correction methodology currently in use by the Bureau of Reclamation.

Research Plan and Methods: We wish to use the NARCCAP data set to run a simulation process parallel to that done by the Bureau of Reclamation to predict flows in the UCRB. This entails spatial interpolation, bias correction (using the same method as Reclamation), spatial and temporal disaggregation, and the VIC hydrology model. The resulting simulated flows will be compared to those produced by Reclamation using the same simulation process, but different inputs (Reclamation uses each WCRP CMIP3 climate projection for the GCM inputs).

What Data Are Needed: Daily average temperature and precipitation in a spatial domain covering the UCRB and extending eastward to cover the headwaters of the South Platte and Arkansas Rivers.

Anticipated Findings/Significance of Work: We hope to uncover the source of the discrepancy between the flows simulated by Reclamation and the observed flows (in the UCRB). Perhaps the problem is the input data set, in which case our implementation of the NARCCAP data should be enlightening. Optimizing flow prediction accuracy will allow for better water management in the UCRB. Further, we wish to evaluate analytically the statistical basis for the quantile mapping bias correction methodology, thus illuminating a widely used procedure.

David Bronaugh

email: bronaugh@uvic.ca
website: http://www.pacificclimate.org

I do data analysis, acquisition, management, and programming for the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium.

Research

PCIC is interested in regional analysis of impacts and is interested in using RCM results for illustrative purposes as well as using the results to drive further statistical downscaling or hydrological and other impacts models.

Daniel Brown

email: danbro@umich.edu
website: http://glisa.msu.edu

Research

Climate research and extension for the Great Lakes region through the NOAA RISA program's Great Lakes center, GLISA.

Zachary Brown

email: zachary.t.brown@uconn.edu

Research

Doing research for the University of Connecticut in order to find trends between climate change and agricultural production. Will be using monthly temperature averages, maximums, and minimums. Will also be using monthly precipitation totals and rates. Also will be using daily average temperature and monthly average temperature.

Nathaniel Brunsell

email: brunsell@ku.edu

Dept. of Geography
University of Kansas

Interests: surface-atmosphere feedbacks, extreme events, ecological consequences of regional climate change.

Research

This research is centered on extreme events and surface-atmosphere feedbacks involving soil moisture, latent heat and precipitation processes.

We will be using NARCCAP data to pursue a number of research projects. First, we will be utilizing wavelets and information theory metrics as a new method for assessing the spatial and temporal dynamics associated with extreme values of temperature, precipitation and winds. These metrics will be compared with the metrics calculated from station observations as a way of assessing the ability of regional models to capture the spatial structure and temporal trends of extreme events.

In addition, we wish to pursue a detailed study of the temporal and spatial scales associated with surface fields (soil moisture, surface temperature, turbulent fluxes) and precipitation feedbacks. We will investigate the use of the information theory metrics as we have done previously with remotely sensed observations and regional climate model output. In addition, we will investigate the ability of maximum entropy production as a possible way to assess these feedbacks from a thermodynamic framework.

Andrew Buddenberg

email: andrew.buddenberg@noaa.gov
website: http://www.cicsnc.org

Research
The NOAA Technical Support Unit (TSU) is preparing for regional climate documents for the 2013 National Climate Assessment (NCA) report. The primary purpose of the regional documents is to provide physical climate information for potential use by authors of the 2013 NCA report. One of the sections in the regional documents summarizes climate model simulations for scenarios of the future path of greenhouse gas emissions. These projections incorporate analyses from multiple sources, including the CMIP3 simulations and downscaled datasets. The NARCCAP data have been used as the dynamically downscaled dataset. The motivation for use of NARCCAP data is its relatively high resolution. We plan to conduct further analysis using additional NARCCAP data (i.e., monthly and daily precipitation and surface temperature) for climate extremes projection.

Marcus Buker

email: ml-buker@wiu.edu

Research
Using the data as an example of netcdf importing into GIS in a class.

Sandy Burden

email: sburden@uow.edu.au
website: http://niasra.uow.edu.au/cei/index.html

Post Doc at the University of Wollongong, Australia in the Centre for Environmental Informatics (CEI) which is part of the National Institute of Applied Statistics Research Australia (NIASRA).

Research

I plan to use NARCCAP temperature data to investigate methods for predicting the location and extent of extreme temperature events. Spatio-temporal statistical models utilising a Bayesian hierarchical framework will be used to develop and improve prediction in relation to these events. The methodology will be assessed and compared with established prediction techniques using outputs from the different GCM-RCM. The findings from this research will improve the identification of areas which may be impacted by extreme events.

Emily Berndt

email: eisenaeb@slu.edu

Research
My main research goal is to study the conveyor belt structure of mid-latitude cyclones and the resulting heavy precipitation that develops inconjuction with the structure. Previously, coarser resolution climate models did not provide adequate resolution to investigate mesoscale structures such as the conveyor belts. I plan to use the higher resolution NARCCAP data to investigate how different climate change scenarios impact the conveyor belt structure. Investigation of the impact of future climate on storm structure can lead to a better understanding of extreme weather events on a regional scale.

I work with Timothy Eichler also of Saint Louis University. His research focuses on how climate change impacts storm track, intensity, and variability. He will use the NARCCAP data identify the most intense mid-latitude cyclones in current and future climate scenarios utilizing a storm track program. I will further investigate the most intense mid-latitude cyclones by studying the storm-structure. I plan to use the NARCCAP data and GRADS to plot system-relative trajectories (ie conveyor belts) for current and future climates. Analysis will determine how the conveyor belt and attendant precipitation stuctures are altered in future climates.

Jamie Cajka

email: jcajka@rti.org

Research
The purpose of this task is to assess climate variables (mainly temperature, humidity and precipitation) as they are projected to be in the future. This is in support of a human migration model which will predict the numbers and locations of persons in the future, as the climate changes.

Peter Caldwell

email: caldwell19@llnl.gov

Since 9/07 I have been a postdoc at Lawrence Livermore National Lab where I am working on regional climate modeling over California with Dave Bader. Before that I got my Ph.D. in atmospheric science at the University of Washington under the tutelage of Chris Bretherton. During that time I focused on subtropical low clouds and their potential climate feedbacks. I have broad interests in climate change and climate feedbacks, and most of my research involves modeling and model validation.

Research

I am curious if the NCEP-forced NARCCAP simulations show consistent precipitation biases over California and if so, whether these biases stem from consistent errors in the character of their precipitation (ie exaggerated frequency or intensity). An informal literature review suggests that all models will show an overestimate of precipitation, though I'm not sure if the reason for this will be consistent among models.

Wendy Callendar

email: Wendy.Callendar@dfo-mpo.gc.ca

Institute of Ocean Sciences
Sidney, BC, Canada

Research

We will be using NARCCAP data to generate forcing, initial and boundary conditions for a ROMS model on the British Columbia coast. This model will be used to look at changes in the strength, structure and seasonal timing of coastal currents in this region under future climate scenarios.

Elliott Campbell

email: ecampbell3@ucmerced.edu
website: http://faculty.ucmerced.edu/ecampbell3/index.html

Assistant Professor
School of Engineering & Sierra Nevada Research Institute
University of California, Merced

Research

Integrating NARCCAP data with soci-economic data (e.g. crop yields) to build statistical models for predicting climate impacts. The most immediate application will be exploring the relationship between the U.S. corn yield record and NARCCAP data.

Alex Cannon

email: acannon@gmail.com
website: http://www.eos.ubc.ca/public/people/grad/A.Cannon.html

University of British Columbia - Climate Prediction Group
Meteorological Service of Canada - Pacific & Yukon Region
201-401 Burrard Street, Vancouver, BC, V6C 3S5
Tel (604) 664-9245, Fax (604) 664-9004

Research

My primary interest is in development of multisite, multivariate statistical downscaling algorithms, and dynamical-statistical downscaling is on the radar.

Philippe Cantet

email: philippe.cantet@meteo.fr

Research
Compare outputs model (historical, projections) in small territories (especially islands in West Indies: Martinique and Guadeloupe).

Bill Capehart

email: William.Capehart@sdsmt.edu

Research

We are working with WRF to explore the role of the land surface in regional weather and climate in the North American northern Great Plains. Specifically, we are looking at hydrologic (precipitation, streamflow, lake levels, soil moisture) and vegetation feedbacks between weather and climate. Our primary focus us the prairie wetland complexes NGP region, how they can be represented in regional climate simulations and their impacts and feedbacks as they move between dry climate phases (drought) to wet climate phases (deluges - especially as illustrated by those experienced in South and North Dakota through the mod-to-late 1990s). Our approaches range from modulation of soil moisture based on remotely-estimated wetland distributions, to the prospect of coupling them with landscape-scale models.

Greg Carbone

email: greg.carbone@sc.edu

Greg Carbone is Associate Professor of Geography, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA. His research interests center on climate variability and change and impacts on agriculture and water resources. Some of his recent research papers on these topics have appeared in Agronomy Journal, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Climatic Change, Integrated Assessment, Journal of Climate, and Journal of the American Water Resources Association. He is a principal investigator for the Carolinas Integrated Science and Assessment group, part of the NOAA-RISA program. He holds a B.A. from Clark University, an M.A. from the University of Kansas, and a Ph. D from the University of Wisconsin.

Research

The Carolinas Integrated Sciences and Assessments group is partnering with Dr. Larry Band at the University North Carolina to examine the impacts of climate variability and change on stream flow and water quality in the Carolinas. The project reflects our collective effort to understand the hydroclimatology of large watersheds in the Carolinas, and to develop related decision support tools for resource managers in these watersheds. The goals of this specific venture include: statistical evaluation of general circulation model (GCM) and regional climate model (RCM) output for the Carolinas, measurement of hydrologic model sensitivity to a suite of meteorological inputs, and comparison of output generated by the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) and Hydrologic Simulation Program-Fortran (HSPF) models.

Bryan Carignan

email: bal24@wildcats.unh.edu

Research
I would like to use the NARCCAP climate change results to help me investigate what might happen to snow hydrology (i.e. snow melt flooding, drought, etc.) in the future due to climate change.

Jim Carleton

email: carleton.jim@epa.gov

I'm the Modeling Team Leader in EPA's Office of Water, and also a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland. My interests in both these realms lie primarily in pollutant fate and transport modeling, and improving simulation methods for pollutants passing through natural or engineered bioenvironments (e.g. treatment wetlands).

Research

I'm interested in the possible use of NARCCAP data to drive watershed models that are used to make regulatory (water quality) and watershed-planning decisions. I'm especially interested in exploring the potential use of this data within the 'BASINS' Decision Support System, possibly in combination with the recently-developed Climate Assessment Tool ('CAT'), which allows modelers to modify historical weather files in order to explore potential consequences of different climate change scenarios on stream flow and pollutant export.

Christy Carlson

email: ccarlson@aer.com

Graduate Student, University of Nebraska - Lincoln
M.S.P.M, University of Oklahoma, 2004
BS, Meteorology/Climatology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2002

Currently employed by AER (Atmospheric and Environmental Research), working as contractor for the United States Air Force at the Air Force Weather Agency within the Specialized Models branch.

Research

Planning to study land-use changes and their effect upon the regional climate of the High Plains. Crop and irrigation, specifically. Plan to use several data sets covering a range of scenarios.

Erik Carlsten

email: ecarlste@gmail.com

Research
Using WRF/chem to simulate transport of aerosols in the atmosphere based on LIDAR data collected.

Daniel Carmona

email: dan_c17@hotmail.com

Research
My work researchs the impacts of climate change on agriculture. I'm starting with the evaluation of precipitation over the Sierra Madre Occidental. I will be evaluating which model best displays the monsoon.

Carlos Carrillo

email: carloscc@email.arizona.edu
website: http://www.atmo.arizona.edu

Research
I am working in understanding the change of the climate mode forcing of the North America Monsoon summer rainfall under the influence of climate change. For that purpose we at the University of Arizona had downscalled two IPCC scenarios using the WRF model. The MPI and HadCM3 GCMs were used as a boundary conditions, and the selection of the scenarios was based on the finding by Dominguez et al. (2009).

However, two RCMs do not help to measure some degree of uncertaintly. Thus, we are intentested in reproducing our preliminary analysis to the simulations done with the NARCCAP project. I am mainly interested in precipitation from the RCM simulatios and large scale forcing from the GCM simulations.

Anna Catafau

email: anna.catafau@unitedwater.com

Research
Working on the potential impacts of climate change on water utilities. I want an access mostly to consult results of simulations for temperature and precipitation variations for different regions of the US. I'll also look at the variability between the different scenarios.

Ka Shing Chan

email: imkschan@ust.hk

I am a PhD student in statistics from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). My research interests are in Bayesian hierarchical modelling and max-stable processes with application to spatial and spatial-temporal data.

Research

I am currently working on a project in hierarchical max-stable spatial modelling and its application to precipitation data. Our objectives are in two-folded. First we want to study the Bayesian estimation procedure and sceond we want to study the changes in extreme precipitation while accounting for residual spatial dependence. We aim to improve the accuracy of some existing Bayesian inferential tools in quantifying the likelihood of extreme spatial events (such as precipitation risk).

Heejun Chang

email: changh@pdx.edu

Research
Our research group's main goal is to understand how climate variability and change will affect hydrology and water resources at multiple spatial and temporal scales. We use a combination of physically-based hydrologic models and statistics to understand the dynamics of hydrologic and water resources system. We plan to use NARCCAP data for climate change impact assessment in the Pacific Northwest watersheds. Our research results will provide useful information for making climate adaptation strategies in the water sector. More information can be found at http://www.web.pdx.edu/~changh/hydro_research.php

Howard Chang

email: howard.chang@emory.edu
website: http://www.sph.emory.edu/cms/departments_centers/bios/faculty/index.php?Network_ID=HHCHANG

Research
NARCCAP data will be used in projects that quantify the health impacts of future climate change. Based on previous population-based studies on the adverse health effects of extreme temperature and air pollution, we will use NARCCAP data either directly or as predictors of future environmental exposures. These projections will be used to estimate the number of excess deaths and hospital admissions attributable future climate change, as well as the associated uncertainties.

Miao-Li Chang

email: changmiaoli@yahoo.com

Research
My research interests focus on using numerical tools on water resource management. My research goal is to understand how multiple stresses (i.e. physical, chemical and biological) interact to affect ecosystem responses. Natural stresses such as drought, salinity, climate change, and anthropogenic stresses such as toxic compounds, nutrients, and habitat destruction are cumulative impacts on ecosystems. The research topics I am interested in are to be able to use modeling tools to reduce the theoretical complexity of a multiple stressed ecosystem to a manageable level. These areas of research are important links between researchers, scientists, engineers and policy makers and managers. The basic research from many disciplines on data collection, data analysis and theories can be combined and linked with numerical models. The research from the biological, physical, and social sciences and modeling framework can also be brought together with policy makers and stakeholders to help us make informed decisions.

Tony Chang

email: tony.chang@msu.montana.edu
website: http://www.montana.edu/hansen/

I received my M.S in Environmental Science and Policy at Northern Arizona University and a B.S in Mechanical Engineering at UCLA. My academic background and interests are firmly rooted in quantitative analysis and analytical methods. During my career in and out of academia, I have worked for a number of federal organizations including, the Forest Service, National Park Service, and USGS. I worked on a number of varying projects which allowed me to gain significant field expertise.

My focus and current interests are in landscape level changes in vegetation distribution given past, present, and future climatic conditions.

Research
Identification of vulnerable species and habitat are essential to developing strategies for managing and adapting to the environmental challenges posed by climatic warming. This project integrates NASA component models and data from the SERGom land use change model to hindcast and forecast responses of ecosystems and species to multiple future climate scenarios in the Rocky Mountains ecoregion of the Great Northern Landscape Conservation Cooperative (GNLCC) and the mountainous portion of the Appalachian LCC. National parks included in these regions are: Glacier, Yellowstone, and Rocky Mountain National Parks in the GNLCC and Delaware Water Gap NRA and Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains National Parks in the ALCC. Data being utilized in this project will include PRISM and DAYMET RCM and CMIP5 forecasts for all scenarios.

The objectives of this analysis are: 1. Quantify trends in ecological processes, ecosystem types, and dominant tree species from past to present, and under projected future climate and land use scenarios using NASA and other data and models across two Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs). 2. Assess the vulnerability of ecosystem types and dominant tree species to climate and land use change by quantifying exposure, sensitivity, adaptive capacity, and uncertainty in and around focal national parks within LCCs. 3. Evaluate management options for the more vulnerable ecosystem types and tree species within focal parks. 4. Design multi-scale management approaches for vulnerable ecosystem types and tree species to illustrate adaptation strategies under climate and land use change. 5. Facilitate transfer of data, methods, and models to federal agencies to facilitate broad application of the decision support tools.

It is expected that this project will provide a direct means for the National Park Service to incorporate NASA data and products into their adaptation strategy planning during the initial and formative years of the LCCs. More specifically, the project will: help to develop an operational framework for adaptation strategy planning; compile key data sets such as downscaled climate scenarios, land use, and time series of historic biodiversity data; use ecological forecasting tools to project past and potential future trends in key indictors; assess vulnerability of ecosystem processes, ecological systems, and tree species to climate and land use change; and demonstrate the development and implementation of management options for National Parks and protected areas centered ecosystems.

Soumyadeep Chatterjee

email: chat0129@umn.edu

I am a PhD candidate at the Dept. of Computer Sc. and Engg., University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

Research

I am a part of the NSF funded project Expeditions in Computing: Understanding Climate Change - A Data Driven Approach. As part of the project, we are trying to construct statistical predictive models for statistical downscaling of GCM model predictions. The NARCCAP data, being dynamically downscaled model outputs over the US and Canada, will be the baseline for comparison of statistical downscaling models using global GCM model outputs.

Somsubhra Chattopadhyay

email: som.agrotech@gmail.com

Research
I wish to study the impacts of anticipated climate change on the water availability and water quality in a watershed here in North Carolina. Thus I plan to use NARCCAP as my primary source of obtaining future climate data.

Chiranjib Chaudhuri

email: chiranjibchaudhuri@gmail.com

Research
I am working on the effect of climate change over India. I would like to use NARCCAP data as a model to set up datasets over India. I am looking to see what type of input WRF takes to study the future climate change (eg. the interpolated fields from CAM) so that I may be able to do the same for India also. I am particularly insterested in Impact of Climate change on the Hydrological cycle. NARCCAP data will be very useful for my research.

Heyin Chen

email: chenhy111@gmail.com

Research
My research project is mainly to examine the impacts of climate variability and change on stream flow and water quality in Las Vegas and to evaluate related water policies for water resource managers in this area.

Liang Chen

email: liang.chen@wku.edu

• Currently a vistor at Western Kentucky University for 1 year
• PHD in Meteorology, degree expected in July 2011, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Science
• 2004-2007 Master of Natural Geography, Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences
• 2000-2004 Bachelor of Atmospheric Sciences, Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Yunnan University

Research Interests:

• Land surface process analysis and simulation
• Regional climate simulations
• Land surface-atmosphere interfaces and interactions using coupled regional climate models
• The Effects of Urbanization on climate change

Research

Dynamically downscaling of the IPCC AR4 climate projections by the global scale NASA GISS Atmosphere-Ocean Model (AOM) and the continental scale simulations from the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP) using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model to 10x10 km2 resolutions

Xi Chen

email: xichen0904@gmail.com

PhD student
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Engineering II, Room 110A
University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL 32816

Research

In this study, potential climate change impacts on runoff and sediment load are assessed based on Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), a semi-distributed hydrologic model. The observed streamflow and sediment load from 1985 to 1994 are used for the model calibration. The rainfall data under the impact of climate change based on two regional climate models (RCMs) from North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP), HRM3-HADCM3 and RCM3-GFDL, will be applied as the input of the calibrated SWAT model to estimate potential climate change impact on the streamflow and sediment loads.

Yongsheng Chen

email: yochen@yorku.ca

Research
My students and I will use NARCCAP data to evaluate the abilities of various models in reproducing temperature, precipitation, and winds prediction in the Ontario region. Model results from hindcast will be compared with available observations. The best model or an optimal combination of the models will be used to drive a regional climate model to produce high-resolution forecast under different climate change scenarios.

Tiffany Cheng

email: chengti@onid.orst.edu

I am currently a graduate research assistant working with PI David F. Hill in Oregon State University's Coastal and Ocean Engineering group. My research focuses on tidal circulation and wave modeling within Tillamook Bay, a major estuary along the Oregon coastline.

Research

Estuaries supply a number of complex ecological services to humans and wildlife. Climate change directly affects the equilibrium in which coastal ecosystems operate and provide value. Our goal is to assess the hydrodynamic response of an estuary system to climate change-driven impacts on three major boundary conditions: long-term sea level rise (SLR), meteorological forcing, and river/hydrological inputs. This study focuses on Tillamook Bay, an estuary located on the northern coast of Oregon. The results of this work will assist both state and federal agencies in coastal planning and decision making.

We apply an unstructured finite-element mesh, coupled ADCIRC-SWAN model to Tillamook Bay, to simulate tidal circulation and waves properly in the near shore environment. ADCIRC provides water surface elevations and depth-averaged velocity inputs to SWAN, while SWAN outputs wave action densities to force the former. The bathymetry that the unstructured mesh is based on is a blend of bathy/topo DEMS produced by the NOAA Tsunami Inundation project and the latest DOGAMI LIDAR data. The mesh is created from the localized truncation error analysis method, thus devoting more resolution to areas of complex bathymetry near the shoreline and within the estuary.

SLR estimates for the central OR coast range on the order of several centimeters to a meter, depending on time. In order to capture this temporal variability, three decade-long simulations, 2020-2030, 2040-2050, and 2090-2011, will be undertaken for our domain. The length of these runs resolves both seasonal variability in tidal signals and major climate regime shifts with periods of 2-7 years. For each decade, the hydrodynamic model will be forced with two scenarios: mean and worst-case. This approach allows for statistical analysis of resultant TWLs everywhere in the domain.

Meteorological data from NARCCAP will be used to force the model for future climate change scenarios. The same met data will be used to produce stream flow datasets relevant for each decade.

Will Cheng

email: chengw@ucar.edu

Research
Estimate wind climate variability using NCARCCAP.

Allen Chhav

email: apc86@cornell.edu

Research
Our current assignment entails predicting and comparing regional climate changes over the next 60 or more years.

Huicheng Chien

email: hchien@slu.edu

Research
Working with members of the Aquatic Research Group I am attempting to predict the spatial variability of streamflow in Illinois and Alabama using a watershed hydrologic model incorporating current and future climate data. Subsequently, the simulated streamflow will be integrated with aquatic species distribution data to predict the spatial distribution of current and future hydrologic habitat for fishes and invertebrates.

Soyee Chiu

email: sc3245@columbia.edu

Research
The Climate Impacts Group at NASA GISS is interested in NARCCAP output for several potential applications:

Drive further downscaling with the WRF-ARW model to the metropolitan level
Directly drive impact assessment models (of agriculture, energy, health, municipal applications, and/or water resource management)
Examine the sensitivity of large-scale circulation patterns to climate scenarios
Determine the statistics of extreme events in participating models
Evaluate the ensemble and member statistics to determine whether NARCCAP-like projects are justified for climate impact assessments in other regions of the world.
Of primary initial interest is the downscaled 20th Century climate scenario, followed by the A2 scenarios in the mid 21st Century.

Janghwoan Choi

email: jchoi@deberry.com

Janghwoan Choi is a water resource engineer and GIS developer at Dewberry LLC in Fairfax, VA. He received his Ph.D degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Texas A&M University. He has experience with progressively increasing responsibilities in application development, offering technology services and full life cycle solutions in support of engineering and risk mapping projects. He is a Professional Engineer, a Certified Floodplain Manager and a Certified Geographic Information Systems Professional.

Research

We are contractors to FEMA and tasked to prepare a climate impact assessment study for the whole United States to reflect the current global climate model results. Previous climate impact study used IPCC AR4 results and summarized in a June 2013 report prepared by AECOM. Our objective is to use climate parameter projections for the year 2060 and develop regression equations that relate peak flow discharges with watershed and climate parameters within a geographic area defined by HUC2 (21 HUC2 watersheds cover USA). We plan to calibrate the HUC2 specific regression equations using observed parameters for over 7,000 stream gage locations. The calibrated regression equations will be utilized to project discharge values for the year 2060. We are planning to compare the regression equation results with watershed projections, if we have resources. These projected discharges will be used to estimate increases in floodplains for national streams. These results will be used by FEMA to make policies regarding their insurance rates and potential modifications to consider for the agency. This work started in August and we need to complete by February 2014.

Kwok Chun

email: kpc715@mail.usask.ca
website: http://www.usask.ca/water/

Research
I am interested in using N American regional climate change assessment program output for engineering assessments under climate scenarios.

Euiseok Chung

email: watervapor@naver.com

Research
I am interested in assessing model output using in situ and satellite observations. Better spatial resolutions of regional climate models compared to general circulation models are expected to be advantageous to resolving the spatial variations of a given geophysical variable, in particular, over complex terrain. I would like to examine this aspect through comparisons between regional climate models and general circulation models and between models and available satellite observations for precipitation and humidity.

Alan Cimorelli

email: cimorelli.alan@epa.gov

I'm an atmospheric dispersion modeler who has been working at EPA Region 3, in that capacity, for close to 40 years. I am one of the developers of the AERMOD model - the present state-of-the-science regualtory air dispersion model required by EPA in most permitting situations. In the last 15 years I have expanded my interests into the fields of integrated multi-media modeling and decision analysis. I am the co-developer of a decision analysis approach (Multi-Criteria Integrated Resource Analysis (MIRA)) which is designed to examine complex issues involving multiple scientific disciplines, varied and diverse stakeholder perspectives and the need for trans-disciplinary learning (i.e., "wicked" problems / post-normal science).

Research

My colleagues and I are presently interested in researching the impact that climate change may have on an air quality, hydrology, and water quality integrated environmental system. To do this we would like to utilize the NARCCAP data as input to our integrated modeling system. Changes in certain meso-scale and PPL meteorological parameters, as described by the WRFG + CCSM / CGCM3 or a further nested version, represent, we believe, the best data available to examine our thesis question.

Adam Cinderich

email: cinderic@msu.edu
website: http://www.geo.msu.edu/

Department of Geography
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824

Research

The objectives of this research are two-fold. The first objective of this research is to perform a validation of the NARCCAP climate simulations using the gridded NARR data and some station observations. The second objective of this research is to assess potential impacts of climate change on corn and soybean production. The geographic focus for the research is the Great Lakes region.

To achieve the first objective, NARR data, along with climate data from surface and upper air stations, will be used to validate the NARCCAP regional climate simulations of the current climate for the Great Lakes region. The downloading of the archived NARR data is underway and with the submission of this proposal, it is hoped that access to the NARCCAP outputs will also become available to this project. Once the data are obtained, multiple variables from NARCCAP will be validated using NARR data and station observations to understand possible biases and errors in the NARCCAP current climate simulations. The climate variables to be validated will include not only the standard variables such as temperature and precipitation, but also derived variables such as drought indices and fire weather indices.

To achieve the second objective, this study will employ a hybrid downscaling approach to develop fine-scale climate change scenarios at the local level that incorporate regionally specific circulation. The approach will utilize empirical transfer functions, which will be developed by using the NARR data and observed climate variables (e.g., daily precipitation, daily maximum and minimum temperatures) at climate stations, to further downscale the NARCCAP simulations to the local scale to project a likely range of future climate conditions for specific locations within the Great Lakes region. These local climate change projections then will be used to estimate the likely impact of future climate change on corn and soybean yields and to assess the potential benefits of implementing a set of adaptation options for the two crops in the region.

This research has several important implications that can affect both future research and applied sciences alike. First, the validation of NARCCAP climate runs will help climate impact assessment work using NARCCAP. Knowing how the RCM performs in simulating current climate is necessary for understanding the potential limitations of RCMs in their predictions of future climate. Understanding the weakness of the RCMs will also help model developers to improve these tools. Future research projects, including those that wish to study climatology in an applied fashion such as agriculture and wind energy, may benefit from the outcomes of this project. Second, because climate change is expected to have substantial impacts on agriculture, the fine-scale climate scenarios developed in this study will benefit for improving regional assessments of climate change impacts on agricultural production. Third, as applied research on climate change adaptation is still lacking, the proposed assessment will provide invaluable information for agricultural management to develop appropriate climate change adaptation strategies.

Carol Clayson

email: cclayson@fsu.edu
website: http://casil.met.fsu.edu

Associate Professor, Department of Meteorology
Director, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Institute
Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306-4520

B.S., 1988, Brigham Young University, Physics and Astronomy;
M.S. (1990) and Ph.D. (1995) University of Colorado, Boulder (Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sci., Aerospace Engineering Sci.)

Research

I am interested in downloading climate and regional models for comparison to data to investigate atmospheric responses to seasonal AMOC variability. This is a proposal for exploratory research of the atmospheric response to a potential slow-down of the AMOC. We propose to explore two closely related aspects of this issue. One aspect is to determine whether observations support local atmospheric warming near regions of reduced ocean convection. Since there is no deep-water formation in the Atlantic during the summer, we will view the spring as a period of AMOC weakening and the fall as a period of AMOC strengthening. We will examine the extensive records of atmospheric temperatures from various European stations downstream of the convection sites, a much shorter time series of satellite-derived air temperatures over the ocean, and a long time series of SST.

Goals: This is an analysis in the area of longer-time scale coupled atmosphere-ocean scales of variability, particularly the Meridional Overturning Circulation of the Atlantic Ocean. An improved understanding of the air-sea heat exchange and resulting temperature differences throughout the upper ocean/lower atmosphere is a necessary component of understanding how the ocean may play a role in climate variability through the AMOC. Our work will provide both a better theoretical understanding of the issues at hand and also an analysis of the extent to which our current climate data records can help resolve these issues. It will furthermore provide some guidance to current climate models regarding AMOC issues.

Our work will supplement the efforts presently directed toward the understanding of climate change by:

• Analyzing land atmospheric temperatures records downstream of the convection region to see whether there have been any significant changes associated with the idea of a reduced AMOC.
• Analyzing SST within the convection regions and upstream of these regions to see whether there has been a trend in its variability during the last 50 years.
• Analyzing satellite-derived air temperatures over the ocean areas to determine whether they are capable of retrieving similar signals.
• Analyzing the impact of horizontal atmospheric diffusionthat associated with the region above (and downstream) the oceanic convectionon the distribution of atmospheric heat downstream of the convection site.
• Developing a framework to theoretically analyze the role of freshwater fluxes in the heat exchange process associated with the AMOC. This includes the incorporation of moisture and water vapor into the SN and Nof et al. 2009 models.
• Determining which mechanisms control the convection-induced heat exchange between the ocean and the air. This is a necessary step toward a complete view of the heat exchange, and will help improve the representation of convection in climate and numerical weather prediction models.
• Comparing regional and climate models to determine how their results with respect to this issue based on resolution and parameterizations differ from each other and from the in situ and satellite observations.

Broad impact: The proposed research will enhance our societal ability to deal with global warming, as it will shed light on the anticipated climatic changes. It goes almost without saying that our understanding of the AMOC should also be useful in various political and economic areas outside geophysics. Global climate models are wonderful tools when one can confidently rely on what they predict. Here, we propose to focus on an important process whose present representation in these models is far from certainthe convective AMOC. We propose to test the analytically based hypothesis that the almost-uniform numerical prediction of cooling due is probably not exclusively due to an AMOC slow down. We suspect that it is perhaps due to high diffusivities, changes in storm tracks or changes in ice cover. Again, our focus is not to examine the numerical models but rather focus on a comparison of the analytics to the observational data. We will do so by focusing on the seasonal variability of AMOC involving a reduction in the AMOC during spring (with no AMOC in the summer) and an increase in the fall.

Ethan Coffel

email: ec2959@columbia.edu

I am a Ph.D student at Columbia University in the Earth and Environmental Science Department. I am working at NASA GISS and currently focusing on changes in extreme events in the US over the next century.

Research

I will use the NARCCAP data to investigate changes in the frequency and magnitude of extreme events over the next century in the continental US. This work will both contribute to basic climate science and assist in climate change adaptation planning.

Rory Coffey

email: rorypc4@vt.edu

Postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Biological Systems Engineering, Virginia Tech

Research

Investing the the impacts of climate change on the fate and transport of waterborne pathogens using watershed modeling techniques.

Rafael Coll Delgado

email: rafaelcolldelgado32@gmail.com
website: http://www.ufac.br

Research
Tree of Knowledge: Exact and Earth Sciences, Physics, Climate Change in the Amazon; Sectors of application: Higher Education Weather Forecasting and Climate Exploration Forestry, Logging and Related Services

To study the spatial and temporal behavior of meteorological variables in the region. Make applications on solar energy and other conditions of the region.

To characterize the biosphere-atmosphere interaction, including the presence of pollution in the environment and its effects.

Kayla Conrad

email: kconrad1@iastate.edu

I am currently working towards an M.S. degree in Meteorology at Iowa State University under our surface water hydrologist, Dr. Kristie Franz. I graduated in May 2008 with a B.S. in Meteorology also from Iowa State. My current research is focused on climate change impacts on hydrologic processes in the upper Midwest.

Research

I am using the operational National Weather Service (NWS) rainfall-runoff hydrologic modeling system (SAC-SMA) to conduct historical and future climate change assessments for the upper Midwest. My study is mainly focused on watershed- and daily-scale assessment of hydrologic model simulations of snow water equivalent, frozen ground, soil moisture content, and streamflow. I am using archived temperature, precipitation, and streamflow data from the NWS to conduct historical model runs, and would like to use NARCCAP regional climate projections to estimate future changes in the hydrologic cycle. I would also like to use the NARCCAP reanalysis data to understand RCM bias and to conduct any necessary bias adjustment on the climate change projections.

Di Cook

email: dicook@iastate.edu

Research
My research is in statistical graphics, plotting data, especially of multivariate data and using interactive graphics.

I work on developing visualization methods for multivariate, and also spatial and temporal data. I also have helped development software for data visualization, ggobi (http://www.ggobi.org), which has a direct connection with R (http://www.r-project.org) and previous versions that connected to ArcVis for geographic exploration. Visual methods are very useful for exploring data, and I have analyzed data on climate change in Central America, and the El Nino effect. I am looking for data that might provide good examples for visualization methods for research papers, but I am also very interested in climate change and analyzing climate data.

Dan Cooley

email: cooleyd@stat.colostate.edu

Assistant Professor in Statistics at Colorado State University since 2007. I worked with NCAR's Geophysical Statistics Project as both a graduate student and post-doc and continue to collaborate with GSP. My main area of research has been in developing statistical methodology for extreme values with a focus on spatial data and atmospheric applications.

Research

We intend to investigate downscaling methods for extreme values, and intend to focus, at least initially, on precipitation extremes. We aim to provide relationships between gridded RCM output and weather station data. We intend to first compare weather station data to NCEP-driven RCM output, and then aim to relate this to GCM-driven RCM output for both current conditions and future scenarios.

Adam Cornwell

email: acornwell@alumni.uwaterloo.ca

PhD University of Toronto
Assistant Professor, Lakehead University

Research

My goal in using the NARCCAP data is to produce a climatic change scenario for planning source water protection and water resource management. The data that I am immediately interested in pertains to the local region of Thunder Bay, Canada, and includes precipitation, evaporation, snow and ice cover fields. In addition to academic interest, the work will contribute to source water protection planning under Ontario provincial legislation.

James Correia

email: james.correia@pnl.gov

Research

I am a post doc at PNNL working on improving the WRF regional climate model. My main focus is on the warm season with emphasis on severe weather environments and precipitation production. I will be conducting studies which relate the frequency of occurrence of severe storms to state and derived variables from the model output.

The goal of this work to assess the current deficiencies in the model and use them to as a guide for uncertainty measures in assessing the impact of climate change on severe storm environment frequency. I will be further examining the model output for physical process studies which can help explain why the model is deficient and make recommendation as to what can be done to alleviate or fix some of these issues.

Paulin Coulibaly

email: couliba@mcmaster.ca

Associate Professor
Civil Engineering Department/School Geography & Earth Sciences
McMaster University
1280 Main Street West
Hamilton, Ontario, L8S 4L7 CANADA

Associate Editor of ASCE Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Guest-Editor of Journal of Hydroinformatics

Research Interests: Hydro-climatic modeling; Hydrologic data assimilation; Uncertainty analysis; Application of data-driven methods in hydrology

Research

NARCCAP data will be used in a research project entitled: "Simulating future continuous flow regime in ungauged basins in Northern Ontario".

A regionalization model has been developed for simulating continuous flow in ungauged basins in Ontario. The next goal is to apply the model for generating future continuous flow under climate change scenarios. This involves using at least 3 RCMs data (daily precipitation and temperature) to produce ensemble flow series that may provide a better picture of future flow variability. The similated flow series will be used for peak and low flow frequency analysis and also for determining possible changes in environmental flow. This information is particularly needed in decision making for future water resources development in Northern Ontario.

Karen Cozzetto

email: kcozzetto@colorado.edu

Postdoc with Jason Neff's lab group in the Department of Geology at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Research

MAIN RESEARCH GOAL: To conduct a drought vulnerability analysis for Bureau of Land Management lands in the Four Corners region under future climatic conditions.

RESEARCH METHOD: Will run projected NARCCAP climate data through a groundwater recharge model developed for semi-arid regions in the southwest. The hydrology model will take into account soil type, soil depth, and vegetation type in addition to varying climatic conditions.

NARCCAP-RELATED PART OF RESEARCH PLAN:

1. Download NARCCAP data for historic time periods and evaluate how well the GCM-RCM combos did in reproducing climate regimes for the historic period.
2. Download NARCCAP data for future time periods.
3. Use NARCCAP data to determine future drought characteristics e.g. timing, duration, degree of water deficit for the various GCM-RCM combinations. Select some generic drought scenarios from the range of projections and run these through the hydrology model to determine areas of water stress for vegetation.
4. May also run some of the NARCCAP data through the model directly as a time series.

DATA NEEDED: Maximum daily air temperature, minimum daily air temperature, 3-hourly precipitation. Will probably look at other variables as well.

ANTICIPATED FINDINGS OF WORK: Produce drought vulnerability maps for BLM land in the Four Corners region. The BLM may be able to use such maps to determine what types of seedlings/seed mixtures to use in certain areas, what types of grazing to allow, etc.

Chance Creelman

email: ccreelma@stfx.ca

Currently a masters student in the Earth Science Department at St. Francis Xavier University. Completed a BSc in Physics/Math and a BA in Economics, both with a focus on computational work.

Research

The Northern regions of North America hold vast reserves of soil organic matter (carbon), once protected from decomposition. Now, soil CO2 emissions in these high latitude areas are expected to accelerate due to rapidly changing conditions. The Northern region represents an important climate risk of international interest that should be monitored in a systematic long-term effort. While technology improvements will make this monitoring physically possible, it is critical that the conceptual framework for monitoring also be planned carefully. The monitoring network will need to make efficient use of funding to target high-risk areas, balance many possible emission predictions that vary spatially and temporally, allow for incremental network growth and take into account transportation costs and accessibility.

Using model forecasts and other spatial datasets, we are undertaking research to project the evolution of CO2 release risk over time. The overall risk at any point in space and time is related to various factors such as expected climate change, the distribution of carbon storage, and carbon sensitivity to temperature and moisture changes. For data analysis, we are using a new Decision Support risk management tool that we have developed, which determines optimal sampling densities and distributions according to these risk factors.

Our current project is to undertake a simulation for Canada only. Canada holds nearly one-half of the world's permafrost-region soil carbon, expects significant Northern climate change, and is also a convenient geopolitical entity where stable funding can be devoted to Long-Term Northern CO2 monitoring network initiatives.

It is anticipated that this work will help move some attention from counting carbon - to the next practical step of monitoring carbon. We also hope that this research will result in discussions that will lead to a Long-Term monitoring initiative. Although the analysis is for Canada only, we expect to publish this work in a high profile international (AGU or other) journal.

Jack Creilson

email: jack@geo.umass.edu

Climate System Research Center
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003

Research

Our interest in the NARCCAP data is to conduct phenological studies utilizing GCM/RCM simulations of climate over the next several decades to the end of the century. Some retrospective studies suggest that certain climate change indices display trends that are similar to the observed phenological records, specifically linking plant development with its basic climate drivers. Our goal is to analyze daily output of multiple GCM/RCM simulations of future climate to see how critical plant-related aspects of climate (i.e., temperature, freeze periods) are projected to change over time and space, focusing on North America for the 2010 to 2100 time period.

Michael Crimmins

email: crimmins@u.arizona.edu
website: http://cals.arizona.edu/climate/

Research
We intend to use NARCCAP data to develop climate change scenarios in support of adaptation planning for several projects across Southwest U.S. These projects will support natural resource managers and agricultural groups in Arizona and New Mexico. The downscaled data will be used to examine potential changes in climatological variables relevant to different sectors and used to guide the development of adaptation planning exercises.

Paul Cross

email: PCross@icfi.com

Research

The research I am involved with is looking at the impacts of climate change scenarios on electricity energy demand. Specifically, the temperature sensitive portion, heating / cooling, both in the residential and commercial sectors over the 20 to 100 year horizon and the implications of climate change on energy use in those sectors. Other possible areas of interest are impacts on the electric grid, electric generating plant operation, and hydro electric plant operation.

Mekonnen Daba

email: dabanok@gmail.com

Mr. Mekonnen Daba holds a BSc degree from Arbaminch University, Ethiopia in Meteorology and Hydrology on 2009 and MSc student in climate change and Development from Arbaminch University since 2011, Mekonnen Daba has also participated in several international trainings and international conference in different countries.

Research

Throughout the world, climate change impact is the main concern for sustainability of water management and water use activities like agricultural production. Climate changes alter regional hydrologic conditions and results in a variety of impacts on water resource systems. Such hydrologic changes will affect almost every aspect of human well-being. The goal of this thesis is to assess the impact of climate change on the hydro climatology of Fincha Sub-basin located in upper Blue Nile Basin of Ethiopia. The GCM derived scenarios (HadCM3 A2a and B2a SRES emission scenarios) experiments were used for the climate projection. The statistical Downscaling Model (SDSM) was used to generate future possible local meteorological variables in the study area. The down-scaled data were then used as input to the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model to simulate the corresponding future stream flow in of Fincha Sub-basin located in upper Blue Nile Basin. A semi distributed hydrological model, SWAT was used to simulate future stream flow. Three benchmark periods simulated for this study were 2020s, 2050s and 2080s.

Anik Daigle

email: anik.daigle@ete.inrs.ca

I work as a research associate in the Environmental Hydrology Research Group of the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), and teach physics in Cégep Garneau, in Québec City, Canada. I obtained a PhD in physics at Laval University in 2006.

Research

My research focuses on the characterization and modeling of water temperature and flow regimes of North American rivers. I would like to use NARCCAP data to characterize the thermal regimes of rivers on large and regional spatial scales. This characterization will allow me to test different methodologies for the planning of a river temperature monitoring network optimized for the Quebec territory, where no such network yet exists.

Ioannis Daliakopoulos

email: daliakopoulos@hydromech.gr

Research

Prof. I.K. Tsanis (Dept of Environmental Engineering at the Technical University of Crete on leave from McMaster University) in collaboration with Prof. P. Coulibaly (Dept of Civil Engineering at McMaster University) and Prof. D. Jacob (Max Planck Institute for Meteorology) are planning to conduct research on the effects of Climate Change in the greater area of the Great Lakes.

The research group (a) will assess the results of the Regional Model - Climate Model combinations available from NARCCAP over the area of interest (b) will apply the REMO Regional Climate model, developed at the Max Planck at 25 km grid scale, driven by NARCAAP meteorological parameters at the boundary values of the domain and (c) compare the results. Based on the success of this research we will proceed to downscaling of the data to a 10 km grid.

The goal of this research is to get higher resolution grid meteorological data for hydrological applications.

Chris Danforth

email: chris.danforth@uvm.edu

Research
I'm looking at NARCCAP data as a source for statistical information on systematic model deficiencies.

Melinda Daniels

email: mdaniels@stroudcenter.org
website: http://www.stroudcenter.org/about/melindadaniels.shtm

Fluvial Geomorphology, Ecohydrology

Research

We are attempting to evaluate coupled effects of climate and land use change in the Christina River Basin, PA, USA. We will be using 50km resolution downscaled data to drive a watershed hydrology model with dynamic land cover.

Indrani Das

email: indrani@gi.alaska.edu

Post Doctoral Fellow
Snow Ice and Permafrost Group
Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks
903 Koyukuk Drive. P.O. Box No 757320
Alaska 99775-7320

Research

Study of the precipitation patterns using orographic precipitation model

Indrani Das, Craig Lingle, Chris Larsen, Regine Hock
Geophysical Institute
University of Alaska Fairbanks, Alaska, USA

Aim of the project: To obtain orographic precipitation patterns over a 1 km/1 km grid over the glaciers in Alaska using LT Model.

Description of the project: It is important to address the problem of the rate the glaciers are thinning and what is their contribution to the rise in sea level. Estimation of volume changes by laser altimeters provides a means to estimate the amount of glacial wastage by calculating its mass balance. Also the changing climate is changing the precipitation patterns over the globe. At places like Mt. Logan, the precipitation is actually increasing leading to a positive mass balance in those areas.

I am currently working as a Post Doctoral fellow using laser altimetry data to estimate volume changes for the glaciers in Alaska. I am also using a orographic precipitation model which will simulate the precipitation patterns over high elevations where we have no altimetry data and will help us better address the problem of extrapolation of volume changes to unmeasured areas.

My research will also help to understand the coupling of atmosphere and the glaciers, whether the changing climate is also increasing the amount of precipitation above certain elevations and how fast are the glaciers thinning. Whether climate influences have increased over large glaciers having high accumulation areas? Large volumes of altimeter data are available in our group, which I intend to use to study the volume changes of the glaciers and their contribution to rise in sea level.

For this I require the meteorological parameters like wind direction, speed, Specific Humidity, Temperature at the highest resolution available (0.5 degrees) from 1957 to the current date available.

Results expected: To develop a precipitation map over the entire state of Alaska from 1957 to the current available date and understand the climate effects at higher elevation where we have no altimeter data. It will help us to extrapolate our results to the highest elevations and give a more accurate estimation of the contribution of Alaskan glaciers to sea level rise.

John David

email: ebo@sandien.com

I am currently completing a second masters in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Connecticut. In addition I am a Research Associate with the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment, a volunteer scientist wit the US Geological Survey, and am associated with the Foundation for Ecological Restoration Monitoring and Assessment.

Research

I am working on a collaborative project with researchers at the National Wetlands Research Center to model the effects of global climate change on the baldcypress swamps in North America. Since temperature and drought in the southeastern portion of North America are predicted to become more extreme in the future by the IPCC, we are requesting data from the NARCCAP to better model the effects of these changes. In particular, we are interested in changes to temperature and drought frequency which are likely to affect the function of these wetlands.

Field observations within the baldcypress swamps are being used to develop models of production, survivorship, and regeneration for 10 dominate species within the Mississippi River Alluvial Valley. The overall behavior of these station-data parametrized models will be compared against model parametrization using NCEP-DOE Reanalysis II and Time Slices results. We further intend to investigate using NARCCAP configurations and the future IPCC scenarios to examine the range of variability of model predictions and likely survivorship.

Neil Davis

email: neild@email.unc.edu

Worked with Dr. Fred Semazzi on regional climate research for my masters at NCSU. After graduating I have been working at the Institute for the Environment at UNC Chapel Hill with a focus on air quality modeling.

Research

I plan on using the NARCCAP data to compare against climate simulations I am currently performing for use in air quality applications. Additionally we may look to downscale the NARCCAP simulations for future year air quality studies.

John Dawson

email: dawson.john@epa.gov

Research

I plan on using NARCCAP data in analyses of climate change on the environment in the US. Specifically, I will be focusing on the interactions between climate change and air quality. This includes the drivers of both outdoor and indoor air quality.

Jay Day

email: jay.day@riverside.com

Research
Riverside?s research interests in climate change are focused on studying the potential impacts of climate change on water resources. Riverside is currently developing a Climate Change Decision Support System as part of a SBIR project for NOAA. The system provides tools to help water managers explore the range of current GCM climate projections and develop scenarios of climate-adjusted streamflow.

Stephan De Wekker

email: dewekker@virginia.edu
website: http://www.evsc.virginia.edu/~atmos/De_Wekker_Lab/Home.html

My research focuses on the investigation of atmospheric boundary layer processes in complex terrain using a combination of field studies, data analysis, and numerical modeling. I seek to apply my expertise to problems in the multi-disciplinary context such as found at the interface with ecology and hydrology.

Contact Information:

Stephan de Wekker, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
University of Virginia
Department of Environmental Sciences
291 McCormick Rd.
P.O. Box 400123
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4123 USA

Phone: 434-924-3324 (office) 434-823-2664 (home)
Fax: 434-982-2137

Research

Our major goal is to investigate feedbacks between land cover change and atmospheric boundary layer dynamics that may contribute to shrub encroachment in the southwestern US. Woody plant encroachment into grasslands is a global phenomenon that results from a variety of global change drivers. Over the last 150 years the southwestern United States has undergone dramatic changes in the composition and structure of vegetation due to the encroachment of woody vegetation. We are developing field and modeling activities to investigate and quantify the feedbacks between shrub encroachment and the consequent changes in surface energy balance in the southwestern US. Results from our field activities indicate a large change in minimum temperatures induced by shrub encroachment during the winter months.

We would like to use NARCCAP data to investigate the changes in minimum temperatures on a decadal time scale in the southwestern US and compare these changes with those induced by shrub encroachment. The results will contribute to understanding the potential feedbacks between land cover change, climate change,and microclimate.

Art DeGaetano

email: atd2@cornell.edu
website: http://www.nrcc.cornell.edu

I am a professor and associate chair of with the department of Earth and Atmospheric Science at Cornell University. I am also the director of the Northeast Regional Climate Center (NRCC). As a faculty member and NRCC director my research interests include the application of climate data to sector-specific decisions and changes and the observed land-based climate record.

Research

Increasingly the NRCC is being called upon to provide data, information and decision tools to stakeholders interested in assessing and/or mitigating their risk to climate change. These requests are far reaching involving water resources, agriculture, ecosystems and environmental issues. As an author of the Northeast Climate Assessment Report (NECIA) I have been increasing called upon to extend our results to different user specific concerns. I anticipating using these data to complement the downscaled climate data used in the NECIA. Currently we are interested in changes in rainfall extremes, snow pack characteristics and temperature data. We are working with several entomological models to assess changes in mosquito abundance as well as habitat expansion for invasive pests. We are also assessing changes in agricultural fungicide usage under climate change conditions.

Paul Delamater

email: pauldelamater@gmail.com

GIS Analyst, Forestry Department, Michigan State University

Research

Main research goals: To explore the relationships between climate, air quality, and human health data.

Research methods: We are utilizing a statistical modelling framework for modelling exposure, climate and health outcome data that integrates methods for point-level spatially misaligned data and change of support regression using Bayesian hierarchical spatial models.

What data are needed: Projected precipitation and temperature data for the conterminous United States.

Anticipated findings or significance of work: Identifying environmental and climate-related factors that are pronouncedly more detrimental will improve the understanding and decision making process of health researchers, policy makers and patients, thereby having far-reaching beneficial effects on the health care system and society.

Matthias Demuzere

email: matthias.demuzere@ees.kuleuven.be

Research

The main goal of our research within the CLIMAQS project is to find out whether spectral nudging improves the model results of quantities important for air quality and precipitation assessment. To find out, we would like to use existing model output data instead of performing a long-term run ourselves.

Ziwang Deng

email: Ziwang.Deng@gmail.com

I am a research scientist at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics of York University, working on a project about developing high-resolution probabilistic climate change projections of extreme events over Ontario from multiple global and regional climate models.

Research

I'm working on developing high-resolution probabilistic climate change projections of extreme events over Ontario from multiple global and regional climate models. I will apply empirical downscaling methods to produce probabilistic projections of extreme climate events (temperature and precipitation) over Ontario using large ensemble of RCM and GCM results. The project will focus on the improvement of confidence level on extreme projections. I will also quantify the uncertainties in the climate change extreme projections mainly asscociate with model imperfection and emission scenarios by producing probabilistic projections of extreme events using all of the available NARCCAP RCM and IPCC GCM results. These results would be of particular interest to adaptation practitioners.

Ankur Desai

email: desai@aos.wisc.edu
website: http://flux.aos.wisc.edu

Research

My primary interests are in ecosystem-atmosphere modeling and boundary-layer interactions. I am a PI of several Ameriflux eddy covariance flux towers where we make measurements of carbon dioxide, water, momentum, and energy exchange to better understand surface-atmosphere interactions and ecosystem carbon cycling. I am also developing data assimilation framework for ecosystem models with these data, specially with the Sipnet and Ecosystem Demography models. As part of that research, I seek to use NARCCAP data to provide meteorological boundary conditions for ecosystem modeling of carbon uptake in future climates and evaluation of RCM for use in forest meteorology.

Krishna Dhakal

email: kpdhakal@siu.edu

Research
Currently I am doing research on climate change impact on urban drainage system of St. Louis, MO. My research objective is to identify the impact on level of service of existing stormwater infrastructure when faced to climate change scenario, and identify green solution to address the problem caused by climate change. My hypothesis is that the increased precipitation intensity due to climate change will increase peak flow to a level that exceeds the sewer system capacity, and this problem could be significantly minimized by using green infrastructure. I expect that the findings of my research will help municipalities visualize their future condition of stormwater systems and suport to make decisions in favor of adopting sustainable solution to a climate change problem.

Ramesh Dhungel

email: ramesh1dhungel@hotmail.com

Research

I am working on my PhD on computation of evapotranspiration (ET) from remote sensing method. These remote sensing models are only able to produce a `snapshot' of the surface energy balance and thus relative ET once each 8 to 16 days at best. The relative ETrF can be interpolated or extrapolated over intervening time periods between satellite overpasses. One of the major `assumptions' in this interpolation of ETrF is that the ETrF from the satellite image date represents the conditions of the intervening time period(s). However, when precipitation occurs within a few days prior to the satellite overpass, evaporation from wet soil can elevate the ETrF values. Water balance model will also be used for tracking water. Atmospheric data and local meteorological data will be used for comparing the final results.

David Díaz

email: davidmz@atmosfera.unam.mx

I am a student of atmospheric sciences at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM). The main research goal of my thesis is evaluate the most probable future conditions of temperature and precipitation under climate change scenarios for Mexico, also determining characteristics of a statistical downscaling compared to dynamical.

Research

It is done a statistical downscaling to most of the participating models in the IPCC AR4 in the SRESA2, SRESA1B, SRESB1 and COMMITTED scenarios, although our interest is focus only in models simulating good enough the observed trend. The statistical downscaling was made by principal components regression using the CRU data base as a predictand field. It was used the XX century control run to calibrate the transfer functions in the period 1901-1970, and 1971-1999 as independent sample.

Comparing the NARCCAP output data of dynamical regional climate models with our data base we'll determine some of the main share features, advantages and disadvantages of a statistical downscaling against dynamical, besides the enormous advantage of cheap computational and human requirements. The main findings are that a statistical downscaling is good enough compared to dynamical to assess regional scenarios.

Yonas Dibike

email: Yonas.Dibike@ec.gc.ca
website: http://w-circ.uvic.ca/

Physical Scientist, Hydro-Climate Analysis & Impact Studies
Aquatic Ecosystems Impacts Research Division
Science and Technology Branch
Environment Canada

Adjunct Assistant Professor
Water & Climate Impact Research Centre
University of Victoria
PO Box 3060 STN CSC
Victoria, BC, V8W 3R4

Research

I am a researcher at the water & Climate Impact Research Centre (W-CIRC) at the University of Victoria in BC, Canada and I work with Prof. Terry Prowse who is the director of the institute. Our research at the W-CIRC focuses on hydrologic and ecological impacts of atmospheric change and variability. Specific examples of W-CIRC research include climate impacts on floods and droughts, groundwater systems, river and lake ice, forest hydrology, lake heat and energy budgets of lakes, alpine and reservoir water supplies, and aquatic ecology. Current W-CIRC research includes:

• climate change impacts on cold regions hydro-ecology
• climate impacts on river ice jams
• climate impacts on peatland and permafrost hydrology
• lake thermal responses to climate change
• climate impacts on aquatic food webs
• climate impacts on groundwater systems
• hydro-climatology of western and northern water resources
• climate impacts on ice-covered aquatic systems

In most cases, we would like to use simulation outputs from different RCMs driven by different GCMs and emission scenarios to simulate the range of possible hydrologic and ecological impacts and the uncertainties associated with them. Access to the NARCCAP data base will help us do our impact research more effectively and greatly enhance our ability to produce a comprehensive impact analysis for the various research project we are undertaking at our research centre.

Noah Diffenbaugh

email: diffenbaugh@stanford.edu
website: http://www.stanford.edu/people/diffenbaugh

Assistant Professor, Department of Environmental Earth System Science
Center Fellow, Woods Institute for the Environment
Stanford University

Research

The research will be part of the NSF-funded CAREER grant "Dynamics and Impacts of Fine-Scale Climate Change". The description of the project from the NSF webpage is:

"This project will test the hypothesis that fine-scale processes regulate the response of climate to elevated greenhouse forcing at the spatial and temporal scales that matter most for climate change impacts. In order to test this hypothesis, the investigators will establish an approach to climate change uncertainty quantification that uses a suite of impacts metrics as indicators of the magnitude and spatial heterogeneity of physical climate change. This approach will require a combination of existing and new climate model experiments; climate model configuration and testing; observational data analysis; and climate change impacts analysis. This over-arching hypothesis will be tested by systematically testing sub-hypotheses relating fine-scale climate processes to (1) the level of greenhouse forcing, (2) the response of large-scale climate processes, and (3) the internal climate system variability.

The investigators will produce a suite of high-resolution climate model experiments and impacts analyses. These experiments and analyses will contribute to a systematic, quantitative evaluation of the importance of fine-scale climate processes relative to other sources of climate change uncertainty, as well as a quantitative assessment of the potential impacts of elevated greenhouse gas concentrations on a suite of impacts indicators. Although this impacts-based approach will have the secondary benefit of generating climate change impacts assessments (including for severe heat, severe precipitation, and snowmelt), the primary benefit will be to better identify, understand and compare key physical processes that govern the response of the climate system to elevated greenhouse forcing.

The project will have a number of tangible broader impacts, including the design, development, and assessment of a framework for the Stanford University Learning About Climate Change web-resource. The investigators will also seek to broaden the participation of underrepresented groups through graduate student recruiting efforts. Further, the results of this project are likely to result in tangible benefits to society, particularly given the current need for improved scientific understanding and communication that inform local, state, national, and international climate policy."

Jenna Disch

email: jennakdisch@gmail.com

Research
To explore the potential use of regional climate model scenarios from the NARCCAP project and apply them to a hydrologic model for an impact assessment of the Grand River, Ontario, exploring both water quantity and water quality impacts.

Chris Dobbs

email: kansasman70@hotmail.com

Research
We are currently modeling coastal sea rise impacts in North Carolina to determine future terrestrial plant migration.

Venkata Dodla

email: venkata.b.dodla@jsums.edu

Dr. Venkata Bhaskar Rao Dodla
PDRA, TLGVRC
Jackson State University
Jackson, MS, 39204

Research

Our research aim is to study the impacts of climate change, associated with future global warming, on air quality over the central Gulf coast region. This work includes dynamical downscaling of climate data of the current and future climates.

We want to use NCEP global reanalysis fields for the current climate and NARCCAP simulation data for future climate change scenarios. We will produce the regional climate conditions and run an integrated mesoscale atmospheric- air quality models to study the air quality over the central Gulf coast region. We plan to use WRF-CHEM model version for this purpose.

The derived products will be used to study the impacts of climate change on air quality and health risk models using GIS will be prepared.

Francina Dominguez

email: francina@hwr.arizona.edu

I am a hydroclimatologist working on future climate change in the Western United States and how it will impact the hydrology of the region. I also have great interest in land-atmosphere interactions, particularly the contribution of local evapotranspiration to precipitation within a region. My affiliations are the Department of Atmospheric Sciences and the Department of Hydrology at the University of Arizona.

Research
As part of a DOE-funded project, we are conducting dynamical downscaling of the HadCM3 model using the regional climate model WRF for a continuous 112-year period at a 35km resolution. The domain is slightly smaller than NARCCAP encompassing the conterminous US and northern Mexico. As we analyze our model results we want to compare/contrast with NARCCAP results.Some of the specific aspects we are looking at are: extreme events, monsoonal precipitation, decadal variability.

Rosa Dominguez

email: rosae@rice.edu

Graduate student
Environmental Engineering
Rice University, Houston, TX (USA)

Research

I am evaluating long term impacts of bioenergy production on water resources in the conterminous US. Currently one liter of fuel ethanol might require some 500-4000 l of water at the crop production step, depending on what crop is used as fuel feedstock and what region is grown at. This relationship might change in the future since climate and CO2 affect both plant productivity and plant water use. The effects are non-linear and will be region-specific, hence a model that can simulate all these factors combinedly and take into account their spatial and temporal distribution is needed. I am using an agricultural model originally developed by USDA and adapted to GIS by EAWAG. The model includes the crop growth and hydrology modules necessary for this analysis but requires thorough calibration of numerous input parameters. This task is specifically hard when dealing with a distributed model as model uncertainty, specifically spatial uncertainty of input and validation data, can be high. The model has been thoroughly calibrated for the numerous input parameters to match recorded crop yields and spatial uncertainty has been reduced to a minimum. I am presently proceeding to simulate the fuel-water relationship with future climates as projected by the regional models from the NARCCAP database. Specifically I will be using temperature and precipitation data for the years 2041-2070. I anticipate the fuel-water relationship will increase in some places and decrease in some other. This study will show the magnitude of the change and whether the change is incremental or decremental and will identify the areas where fuels can potentially grow using less water and the areas where fuel crops will require more water to maintain current productivity. This research is relevant to bioenergy policy and water resources planning.

James Dryden

email: jdryden@okstate.edu

Research

Researching the potential climate change impacts on wind resources in Oklahoma

The overall goal is to forecast changes in wind power density across Oklahoma in order to keep Oklahoma's wind industry as economically robust as possible as well as keep provide a look at possible future changes in wind resources as a result of anthropogenic climate change. I plan to do this by taking past wind climate observations from NCDC (and possibly similar resources) and choose a few GFDL, IPCC, NCAR, etc. GCM's for reanalysis runs as well as future runs containing CO2 emission scenarios. I most likely will take a statistical/empirical downscaling approach to increase model agreement and spatial resolution in order to capture mesoscale/microscale processes that often affect wind regimes. I will be using some statistical methods such as root-mean-square-error as well as other methods such as tree-structured regression to validate model accuracy and to downscale, respectively. I plan to compute changes in wind regimes and provide some potential percent decrease/increase in wind power density that would be of use/interest to people involved in the wind industry in Oklahoma such as investors, land owners, state energy department, etc.

Qingyun Duan

email: qduan@llnl.gov

Qingyun Duan, Ph.D.
Research Scientist
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Tel: 925-422-7704

Research interests: climate downscaling, uncertainty quantification, water resource impact studies

Research

I am interested in obtaining regional climate model outputs, particularly precipitation and temperature outputs, and use them as inputs to water resources models. Though I am not a climate modeler, I am interested in interpreting climate model outputs from multiple models and obtain an estimate of uncertainty from multimodel outputs.

Currently I am working on a project titled: "Enhancing California's water decision support system". This project, funded by UC DOE Lab Management Fees Research Program, intends to study the potential extremes for California water resources as a result of climate change. The main goal of the project is to investigate how water decision support system - CalSim model - operates under climate change scenarios. Toward this goal, we will need (a) downscaled climate projection for California, (b) information about uncertainties in the CalSim solutions, and (c) development of the water management solution with risk assessment associated with climate change.

Dave DuBois

email: dwdubois@nmsu.edu
website: http://aces.nmsu.edu/academics/pes/david-w-dubois.html

Research
My primary application of the NARCCAP database will be to look at future projections of air quality and health in the southwest US. Emphasis will be on the soil moisture, precipitation, storm tracks, and wind as we are interested in the frequency of extreme dust events in southern New Mexico and Arizona.

Guillaume Dueymes

email: guillaume.dueymes@gmail.com

Research
My main focus is the study of some climate change impacts on Canada and in some other regions in the world.

- Develop and evaluate future high-resolution climate information on extremes from Regional Climate Model (RCM). Applying statistical downscaling methods from GCM to RCM resolutions and compare with RCM outputs (e.g, Automated Statistical Downscaling)

- Generate high-resolution probabilistic climate change scenarios including extremes and variability with assessments of their associated uncertainties (i.e. from GCM, GCM/RCM or GCM/SD cascades, and downscaling methods).

Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux

email: ldupigny@uvm.edu

Research
I would like to use NARCCAP data to explore processes and biases at a fine spatial resolution in New England.

Debbie Dupuis

email: debbie.dupuis@hec.ca
website: http://neumann.hec.ca/pages/debbie.dupuis/

Research
I would like to examine the data for the purposes of several different projects: projected energy use in the NE US, assessment of tools for extreme weather on extreme projections, etc.

Chase Dwelle

email: dwellem@umich.edu

PhD student in civil engineering at the University of Michigan.

Research

My research addresses whether the current generation of climate projections, combined with detailed mechanistic models of hydrologic and hydraulic processes, can yield information about the current state and future changes in erosion and sedimentation processes, and their impact on agricultural health with a high degree of certainty.

John Dykema

email: dykisma@deas.harvard.edu

Research Associate at Harvard University, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Member, CLARREO pre-phase A team
Member, GCOS Working Group on Atmospheric Reference Observations (WG-ARO)
Research interests: climate model assessment using satellite observations, Bayesian methods, climate change impacts

Research

Quantitative assessment of the impacts of climate change requires high-resolution regional information computed from ensembles of models that explore different well-founded representations of the physics and chemistry that govern climate. Although different methods exist for downscaling variables such as temperature and precipitation computed from global GCMs at spatial scales of 100-300 km, regional climate models provide an attractive alternative option. Of particular interest is the quantiative relationship between regional temperature and precipitation and agricultural productivity in the United States. NARCCAP data will be used to compute state-level changes in growing degree days and growing season total precipitation to investigate potential changes in agricultural productivity in the US in the 21st century with an ensemble-type approach.

Kyle Eckart

email: eckartk@uwindsor.ca

Research
My research will be focused on assessing impacts of climate change on watersheds around Windsor Ontario and examining possible adaptation strategies. I will likely be downscaling climate data, removing bias, and then using a hydrological model to determine impacts on watersheds.

Jacob Edman

email: jedman@uci.edu
website: http://www.ucchm.org

Research
I'm performing high-resolution hydrologic simulations of California, with an emphasis on water management systems. I will use downscaled climate data from NARCCAP to force these simulations. By performing these simulations, we hope to better understand how water availability in California will change in the coming century, as well as gain some insight into the resiliency of California's water management systems with respect to a changing climate

Timothy Eichler

email: teichler@slu.edu

Research
I intend to use the NCARCCAP data to generate cyclones in current and future climate. The climatology and interannual variability of storm intensity and frequency in the current climate will be developed and compared with other model and reanalysis storm track datasets we have developed in-house (e.g. NCEP, ERA40, AR4). Once complete, storms will be examined in the A2 scenario to determine the impacts of climate change. A special advantage of utilizing the NCARCCAP data is that given the high resolution relative to coarse-grid climate models, it will permit the investigation of storm structure (e.g. conveyor belts). Accomplishing this task will not only give perspective of how storm frequency and intensity will respond to climate change (something my students are investigating in the AR4 and the now-released AR5 models), but will also enable us to assess the structure of storms. This is important from 2 perspectives: 1) how well does model cyclone structure conform to observed storms and 2) how may storm structure change in response to global warming? Clearly, changes in structure could have large consequences on the regional impacts of storms.

Nellie Elguindi

email: nelguind@ictp.it

Research
We would like to use the NARCCAP data to assess climate change in the US by applying the Thornthwaite climate classification scheme. In general, our research methods involve creating climate classification maps for the present-day and future runs to determine how different climate types will evolve. We hope that results from this study will provide an integrated overview of climate change in the US.

For this study, my colleague, Andy Grundstein, at the Univ. Of Georgia and I would like to use the NARCCAP RCM data to assess how climate types in the US will evolve in the future period (2041-2070) compared to the present-day period (1971-2001). We will be using a modified Thornthwaite Climate Classification scheme that is described in

Feddema, J. 2005. A revised Thornthwaite-type global climate classification. Physical Geography 26:442-66.

We would like to compare our present-day results to the observed US climate types presented in,

Grundstein, A. (2008). Assessing climate change in the contiguous U.S. using a modified thorthwaite climate classification scheme. The Professional Geographer, v60.

Grundstein, A. (2009). Evalutation of climate change over the continental US using a moisture index. Climatic Change, 93, 103-115.

Nathan Elliott

email: nelliott@prbo.org

Research
Title: Confronting uncertainty in species distribution projections--Increasing the applicability of an essential tool in climate change adaptation planning. Project Description: Actions to adapt existing conservation and management strategies to the reality of climate change require our best science-based understanding of potential impacts to species and ecosystems. Because conservation and management actions are largely place-based, projections of geographic range shifts induced by future climates have been central to ecological impacts assessments. Range shift modeling can provide forecasts of the rate, magnitude, spatial and temporal nature of climate impacts that can help assess species relative vulnerability, highlight current habitat either most resilient or most susceptible to change, inform land acquisition strategies and connectivity design, support placement and prioritization of monitoring efforts, and guide restoration and management objectives.

Such forecasts are generally produced by applying downscaled future climate surfaces derived from general circulation model outputs to bioclimatic modeling algorithms. Although hundreds of academic papers have published maps of the potential future distribution of conservation targets, the translation of models into management action has been compromised by the very large uncertainties associated with range shift modeling efforts. At every step, choices must be made about source and quality of locality data, species distribution modeling (SDM) approach, selection of environmental variables, which general circulation model outputs to use, parameterized by which greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, and downscaled to how fine a spatial resolution. Virtually every study chooses a different combination among these methodological alternatives. Estimates of uncertainty are rarely provided and almost never attributed to a particular source. Managers are understandably hesitant to use scarce time and resources for largely irreversible decisions to develop and implement adaptation plans, based on ecological forecasts with so much inherent uncertainty.

CAS & PRBO propose to directly address this critical gap between modeling results and management action. We have designed a comprehensive analysis of uncertainty in modeling species future distributions that can increase their meaningful contribution to climate change adaptation planning. Using a representative sample of both California breeding birds and endemic plants, we will explicitly partition among five alternative sources of variation in SDM projections of future distributions, and test for the significance of their contribution to overall model variation. The research outputs will 1) describe the range and degree of agreement among future bioclimatic scenarios for a representative sampling of CA endemic plants and land birds; 2) develop metrics of the degree of projected change across the bioclimatic requirements for 100 plant and bird species, and quantify the uncertainty in those projections; 3) identify the highest-certainty hotspots of climate refugia and climate flux for the target plant and bird species; 4) produce maps of priority areas for monitoring of projected climate impacts, and 5) disseminate all project results to the LCC Environmental Change Network, and summary data products among a range of relevant outlets. The broader results from our project will guide managers in their ability to rely on SDM results relevant to their management targets, will help users of SDM techniques understand the inputs required to build less uncertain models, and will increase confidence in the appropriate use of range shift modeling for climate adaptation planning.

Hugh Ellis

email: hugh.ellis@jhu.edu

Research
I am the PI of an ongoing EPA STAR project. I would like to obtain GCM output suitably transformed for use with MM5 (via regridder) to conduct regional air quality simulations for a variety of climate change scenarios.

Methodology for Assessing the Effects of Technological and Economic Changes on the Location, Timing, and Ambient Air Quality Impacts of Power Sector Emissions

The sensitivity of the amounts, locations, and timing of power sector emissions to economic and technological assumptions has two important implications. One is the need for a theoretically defensible, transparent, and practical methodology for determining future scenarios of emissions locations and timing. This framework will be provided by the use of a sequence of market-equilibrium models constrained by land use and emissions limits. First, the HAIKU model will be used to disaggregate national technology, demand, and emissions totals for a given scenario year (such as those that might result from IPCC scenarios) to regions. Second, finer scaled regional models will allocate specific generation facilities to the U.S. national grid comprised of 36x36 km cells, and will estimate their hourly emissions.

The second implication is the need to test the robustness of the emissions disaggregations to assumptions concerning load growth, technological change, and policies, such as emissions caps. We propose to systematically explore the sensitivity of both emissions and ambient air quality results to these uncertainty drivers mentioned above in order to assess which assumptions matter most. Ambient air quality for an example set of scenarios will be simulated using MM5/MCIP/SMOKE/CMAQ. In addition to showing how robustness of ambient concentrations can be assessed, this will also demonstrate the practicality of integrating the source disaggregation methodology with the SMOKE emissions processing system and subsequently, the CMAQ transport and fate model itself.

Tegenu Engda

email: tegenu@gmail.com

Graduate Student at University of Wyoming, Hydrology and Water Resources Program

Research

I am working on modeling 1D vertical soil water flow and surface energy balance at selected sites across the state of Wyoming. I need NARCCAP 30 years historcial climatic data input to drive normal year conditions.

Robert Erhardt

email: erhardt@email.unc.edu

Research

I am working with Larry Band (Director, UNC Institute for the Environment, UNC-Chapel Hill) and my thesis advisor Richard Smith (Professor of Statistics, UNC Chapel Hill) on using regional climate models to predict distributions of future rainfall at point locations in North Carolina under different climate change scenarios. We will be working with NCEP and several regional climate models. I am currently pursuing a PhD in statistics at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Robert Erhardt

email: erhardrj@wfu.edu

Research
I use RCMs to study downscaling algorithms, and to study impacts of climate change on insurance markets.

Tyler Erickson

email: tyler.erickson@mtu.edu
website: http://people.mtri.org/tyler+erickson

Research scientist at the Michigan Tech Research Institute in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I work in the area of designing (award winning) web-accessible geospatial data systems that provide access to spatial and temporal environmental datasets and models. I primarily work with open-source geospatial software, and for this project we have proposed to release all the source code that we develop so that other research groups can extend the data system in the future.

Research

My research interests are in building web-based geospatial information systems for providing access to environmental datasets and models.

Ricky Rood, a climate researcher from the University of Michigan, and I have written a proposal to NOAA's Climate Program Office. The overall goal of the proposal is to create a geospatial web service that provides climate model datasets in a wide variety of GIS-friendly vector and raster dataformats (ESRI shapefiles, ASCII grids, GeoTIFF, KML/KMZ, WMS, WFS, etc.). The main issue we are addressing is that GIS user community typically does not work with NetCDF datafiles, and this has prevented many researchers from working with climate model forecasts. Although we will primarily be focusing on providing access to global-scale climate datasets contained in the PCMDI CMIP3 dataset archive, we would like to make the data system flexible enough to also be able to serve up regional-scale climate model datasets like NARCCAP.

Hyung Il Eum

email: hieum01@gmail.com

Research
Main research goals: The aim of the research is to assess the impact of climate change on hydrologic regime in sand oil regions.
Research methods: An ensemble of RCM/AOGCM's simulations is used to simulate hydrologic reaction corresponding to the land-use change and climatic variability as well.
Research plan: We will apply the method to a small watershed as the first application, then it will be expanded to over oil sand regions such as the Athabasca River basin in Alberta.
What data are needed: 7 variables are needed to simulate; precipitation, temperature, pressure, specific humidity, wind speed, shortwave radiation, and long wave radiation.
Anticipated findings or significance of work: We can assess how water quantity will be changed, e.g. a range of monthly stream flow change, according to anthropogenic and natural variabilities.

Qin Fan

email: quf101@psu.edu

Research
My current research examines impacts of climate change on US households by linking a random utility model (RUM) of location choice with a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of regional economic activity. Linking these models enables feedbacks resulting from climate change-induced migration by simultaneously updating population measures in the CGE model while changing wage rates in the empirical RUM model. I am planning to use NARCCAP projection data on climate extremes (e.g. extreme temperatures, extreme precipitation) to simulate internal migration pattern under changes in climate and further to simulate regional economic impacts due to climate change-induced migration in terms macro-economic indicators.

Xingang Fan

email: xingang.fan@wku.edu

Assistant Professor
Dept. Geography & Geology
Western Kentucky University

Interested in climate modeling, climate impact study, numerical weather modeling

Research

To study the impact of climate change on regional ecosystem modeling. I plan to further downscale NARCCAP data (e.g., MM5I/CCSM) using the WRF model to provide input to an ecosystem model. The main goals are to investigate forest ecosystems under a changing climate.

Zuber Farooqui

email: ZFarooqui@eng.tamuk.edu

Research

Overview
Surface ozone is a secondary air pollutant known to cause extensive air quality problems. The South Texas region consists of a number of coastal and inland urban areas classified by Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) to be in near non-attainment status of the 8 hour ozone standard. These near non-attainment areas (NNA) have to demonstrate appropriate planning processes to continue to remain in attainment. This issue becomes even more crucial since the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) has lowered the 8 hour ozone standard from current value of 85 ppb to 75 ppb which will result in widespread non-attainment problems in South Texas region. The USEPA has mandated the usage of certain sophisticated three-dimensional photochemical models for regulatory purposes. The modeling of dynamics of ozone processes is further complicated by the nonlinear nature of its formation. Advanced air quality modeling techniques are required to address this issue so that potential emission control strategies may be developed to combat the ozone problem.

There has been very little focus so far on the effect of climate variability on regional and urban ozone quality in the South Texas region. Rising temperatures due to climate change can substantially enhance ozone exceedances if the new standards are implemented. Emissions control policies in these parts are currently implemented by assuming the constancy of climate. The air quality modeling performed in this research study also addresses the significance of climate change on spatial and temporal responses in modeled peak surface 8 hour ozone concentrations and ozone exceedances due to potential temperature perturbations.

Overall the primary issues motivating the research study is to enhance the awareness of policy makers regarding the impact of climate change on surface 8 hr ozone concentrations so that future emission control policies for the South Texas region may be developed factoring the impact due to climate change.

Key knowledge gaps addressed by the project
Assess the impact of global climate change on surface ozone levels in South Texas region during the ozone episodes.

Scope of the work
It has illustrated the increasing importance of climate change towards regional air quality issues suggesting a comprehensive approach towards long-term emissions reduction strategies and climate change across different regions. The scope of the work includes the use of climate scenarios and emissions projected by Inter-government Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) into photochemical model to find the impact of future climate change to the surface ozone levels in south and central Texas. North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP) has provided high resolution climate change scenarios and investigated uncertainties in regional scale projections of future climate change. The output from the regional climate models (RCMs)/GCM nested over North America for the A2 SRES for current scenario (1/1/1968 - 12/31/2000) and a future scenario (1/1/2038 - 12/31/2070) is proposed to be utilized in the study. The present and projected future scenarios will be used in a regional scale photochemical model (CAMx) to simulate tropospheric ozone over south and central Texas.

Recent Accomplishments
Base case modeling simulations
The photochemical model CAMx was used in this study. The base case evaluation of the photochemical model simulations for both the high ozone episodes disclosed that the model simulated elevated ozone values was within the prescribed limit set by EPA. The model also captured well the diurnal variability of ozone observations. The ozone episode of 2002 had higher ozone values in Corpus Christi region in comparison to the 1999 ozone episode. This illustrates the importance of meteorology on ozone levels since the values of peak ozone concentrations were higher in 2002 despite increasing implementation of emissions controls imposed on emission sources since 1999.

Impact of perturbed temperatures
A modeling study was performed to identify the potential impact of temperature perturbations on tropospheric ozone concentrations in South and Central Texas. The temperatures were increased uniformly throughout the simulation domain and through the vertical layers by 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 °C in accordance to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report by Meehl et al. (2007). The results revealed that global temperature rise could significantly impact peak 8-hour ozone concentrations and 8-hour ozone exceedances especially in the urban regions of South and Central Texas. The maximum impact in both the cases is in the San Antonio urban region, Austin and in the counties north-east of Victoria close to Houston-Galveston area. The results disclose that climate interactions play an increasingly important role in local and regional air quality background concentrations. The issue of climate change becomes even more important in case of more stringent 8 -hr ozone standards. Hence, climate change should be considered in developing emissions control strategies and setting future ozone standards.

Broader perspectives of this research and benefit to the nation
The increasingly hemispheric nature of air quality problems (Akimoto 2003) linked with global processes brings forth the debate that future emission control strategies cannot be developed in isolation in a particular region. The strategies need to be developed conjunctively with other regions. In order to accomplish this it is important to accurately determine the ozone dynamics and the relative contribution of emissions from each region. The study has accomplished these objectives over the South and Central Texas regions. It has also emphatically illustrated the increasing importance of climate change towards regional air quality issues thereby suggesting a coordinated approach towards long-term emissions reduction strategies and climate change across different regions while dealing with both future air quality development and climate change.

In addition to climate change, land use changes and increasing anthropogenic emissions, which are products of expanding urbanization, will add to temperature amplifications (Civerolo et al. 2007). They will play an important role in determining the future air quality. The effects of increasing urbanization also needs to be factored in along with climate change to develop emission control strategies across different regions. The present study did not model the effects of increasing urbanization and focused on climate change alone. The modeling results presented here despite being limited by uncertainties provides a first insight on how to develop effective emission control stratgies in case of climatic perturbations over South and Central Texas. This modeling study can serve as a paradigm at the national level.

References

1. Akimoto H. 2003. Global Air Quality and Pollution. Science 302, 5651:1716-1719.
2. Civerolo, Kevin, C. Hogrefe, B. Lynn, J. Rosenthal, J. Y. Ku, W. Solecki, J. Cox, C. Small, C. Rosenzweig, R. Goldberg, K. Knowlton, and P. Kinney. 2007. Estimating effects of increased urbanization on surface meteorology and ozone concentrations in the New York City Metropolitan region. Atmospheric Environment, 41:1803-1818.
3. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 2007. Climate Change 2007: The Scientific Basis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
4. Seaman N. L. and S.A. Michelson. 2000. Mesoscale structure of a high ozone episode during the 1995 NARSTO-Northeast study. Journal of Applied Meteorology., 39:384-398.

John Fasullo

email: fasullo@ucar.edu
website: http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Staff/Fasullo/index.html

I'm a Project Scientist in the Climate Analysis Section and work iteratively with observations and CMIP simulations to better understand both.

Research

I'm trying to better understand climate change in North America as it relates to model resolution, the benefits of regional nesting, and their larger implications for global simulations. I have substantial experience with the CMIP3 archive and anticipate trying to evaluate the potential benefits achieved through regional nested models.

Balazs Fekete

email: bfekete@ccny.cuny.edu

Research
I am involved in a number of projects (funded by NSF, EPA and NASA) where we are looking at the affects of human activities on the water system. Our particular interest is how river flow, water temperature, and water quality changes due to engineering works (e.g. inter basin transfers, reservoir operations, consumptive water uptake) and various pollution sources (thermal loadings from power plants, point source contamination from sewage treatment plants, etc.). Our work looks at the changes in the past compared to the present and assesses the possible future responses to changing climate.

We are particularly interested in getting downscaled climate data (primarily air temperature and precipitation, but we are also interested in other variables such as wind speed, vapor pressure, solar radiation, etc.). We are interested in NARCCAP because it offers higher resolutions than global circulation models can provide.

Mark Feller

email: mrfeller@usgs.gov

Research
The LandCarbon program is a national assessment focusing on two interrelated objectives: 1) implementation of the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, Section 712; and 2) improved understanding of carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas fluxes in and out of ecosystems related to land use, using scientific capabilities from USGS and other organizations. The assessment covers all major terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, is conducted for all fifty states, provides estimates of baseline as well as future potential carbon storage and greenhouse gas fluxes, and conducts analysis of effects of major natural and anthropogenic processes that impact ecosystem carbon storage and greenhouse gas fluxes. Major natural and anthropogenic processes include climate change, wildfire, land use change, and land management activities. The integrated assessment relies on existing data collected by various national inventory, monitoring, and remote sensing programs. The assessment uses an interdisciplinary approach, including remote sensing, land change studies, biogeochemical modeling, mapping of wildfires, wetland ecology, aquatic studies and hydrological modeling. The assessment is conducted at a regional scale: scenarios, model parameterization, analyses, uncertainty estimates, as well as progress tracking and reporting of assessment results are all conducted using EPA?s level II ecoregions.

Sam Fernald

email: fernald@nmsu.edu
website: http://aces.nmsu.edu/academics/waterresearch/home.html

Alexander "Sam" Fernald
Watershed Management associate professor
New Mexico State University

Water quality hydrology, surface water groundwater interactions, traditional community hydrology, ecohydrology

Research

NM EPSCoR is simulating hydrology in mountain basins as part of the NSF funded project "Climate Change Impacts on New Mexico's Mountain Sources of Water"

NARCCAP data promise to be the most readily available and useful scenario data for our hydrologic modeling efforts.

Daniel Fernandez

email: daniel.fernandez@colorado.edu

I'm affiliated with the University of Colorado and I am interested in modeling carbon stock changes, fire, and species range changes, with climate change in lands administered by the San Juan Public Lands Center.

Research

Use high resolution climate chnages scenarios to model ecological changes in SW Colorado, specifically the area administered by the San Juan Public Lands Center.

1. Compile and orient GCM forecasts over topography, vegetation cover, etc. to show regional impacts—essentially developing clear visuals for model projections.
2. Analysis of historical simulations vs. actual climate for the targeted region. This is an important step for understanding the error associated with model forecasts and particular problem areas for simulations of SW Colorado. This analysis would be done for both the GFDL and CCSM output with the intent of evaluating which model provides more reliable output for the SW Colorado region.
3. Analysis of future simulations and comparison of model outputs. Two components here: one aspect would be to evaluate model differences, and use this in conjunction with the historical climate analysis to develop a range of potential impact projections for the region.
4. Prepare an overview of projections and uncertainties for local, state and federal staff. In part, the intent here would be to provide information on how the BLM/USFS can begin to take advantage of emerging national downscaling efforts.
5. Preliminary impact analysis for priority BLM/USFS areas.

Joel Finnis

email: jfinnis@mun.ca

Research

NARCCAP data will be used for statistical downscaling and probabilistic forecasting of extreme weather events under enhanced greenhouse conditions. Work will focus on the Canadian province of Newfoundland & Labrador, and will contribute to the provincial government's climate adaptation activities. The response of precipitation and associated hazards to a warming climate is of particular interest. This is a joint project between Memorial University of Newfoundland, Natural Resources Canada, and the provincial Department of Environment & Conservation.

Steve Flanagan

email: sflanaga@umd.edu

Research
Research examines how climate variability and plant characteristics affect forest ecosystem structure, dynamics and distribution in North America. I am performing a sensitivity analysis on how climate parameters like temperature, precipitation and radiation affect forest structure attributes such as height, biomass and plant functional type. At the same time I am working on adding plant migration capabilities to the Ecosystem Demography (ED) model. I plan on adding to the two areas of research together to examine how future climate projections influence ecosystem change and if the dispersal rate of specific plant functional types falls within the expected climate change rate. I would use the NARCCP data as climate inputs for the model.

Karl Fleming

email: karl_fleming@fws.gov

Biologist for U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. I am located at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. My responsibilities it to implement habitat restoration or enhancement on private property to benefit Service trust species.

Research

I work with private landowners in various parts of the the State of Utah to provide habitat for U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service trust species. One of the program's focus areas is the Bear River Watershed and I am interested in projected climate changes so important habitat ares and changes in current habitat types can be identified for the future.

Chris Fletcher

email: chris.fletcher@utoronto.ca

Research

We will be using the NARCCAP data to investigate cryosphere-atmosphere interaction and surface albedo feedbacks under climate change. We aim to compare results with previous research using output from global coupled models, thus assessing the impact on these phenomena from model spatial resolution and/or the complexity of land-surface and vegetation models.

Patrick Foley

email: patrick.m.foley666@gmail.com

Research
The Corps is doing a research study on potential climate change impacts on flooding of the Red River of the North. Our proposal is to enter NARCCAP and other available regionalized climate data into existing hydrologic models to evaluate how magnitude and timing of flooding at Fargo, ND, might change. All large historic floods have been a combination of snowmelt and precipitation and one goal is to see how the climate data performs for that type of flood.

Bill Forsee

email: bill.forsee@dri.edu

Desert Research Institute

Research

I am interested in climate change impacts upon precipitation processes and intensities at various temporal and spatial resolutions, extreme event frequency, and surface hydrology. I have worked/am working on projects to assess climate change impacts upon stormwater infrastructure design in the Las Vegas metropolitan area using a hydrologic model and to more broadly assess projected changes in extreme event frequency. In these projects, extreme value distributions are fit to sets of annual maximum series derived from NARCCAP data sets and other data sources. Preliminary findings thus far include substantial differences in extreme sub-daily (6-hour, 100-year storm) precipitation intensities from different NARCCAP data sets for grids encompassing the Las Vegas area. Further work includes expanding to locations outside of Las Vegas with a focus upon the arid Southwest.

Joshua French

email: joshua.french@ucdenver.edu

Research
I plan to utilize existing methodology (with planned future improvements) to confidently identify regions likely to experience "extreme" climate events, e.g., temperature increase of at least 3 degrees Celsius. Research goals include developing the methodology, applying the methodology to these data sets, and publishing the findings in peer-reviewed research journals. The methodology developed will have combinations of spatial, spatio-temporal, multivariate, and large-data components. Free, open-source software related to this research will be made available to the public.

Francis Gachari

email: regcm4@gmail.com

PhD Researcher at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology.
Member of RegCNET: a network of researchers using Regional Climate Model 3 (RegCM3), CETEMPS Hydrological Model (CHyM) as well as General Large Area Model for annual crops (GLAM).

Research

Research interests: Mechanisms responsible for severe hydrology droughts and floods in the Eastern Africa Region. Relationship between regional temperature, precipitation and agriculture and their relevance to regional food security, risk management and disaster preparedness. The factors that make the region vulnerable to drought and floods especially in the recent past.

Anticipated results: That there exists reliable time trends which can be used to predict extreme hydrology events in the region in terms of timing duration and physical location. Provide higher resolution simulations for specific areas in the region.

Phillipe Gachon

email: philippe.gachon@mail.mcgill.ca

Research Scientist – Adaptation and Impacts Research Division
Atmospheric Science and Technology Directorate, Environment Canada @ McGill University, Montreal, Québec, Canada

Affiliations

• Adjunct Professor, Centre pour l'Étude et la Simulation du Climat à l'Échelle Régionale (ESCER), Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Québec at Montreal (UQAM), Montréal, Québec.
• Invited Professor, Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, Eau-Terre-Environnement (INRS-ETE), University of Québec, Québec.
• Associated member, Global Environmental and Climate Change Centre (GEC3) at McGill University (www.mcgill.ca/gec3).

Research

Current Research topic:

• High resolution extreme climate scenarios & Statistical downscaling methods
• Extremes analysis: temperature, precipitation, winds and hydrologic variables
• Dynamical downcaling
• Large/Mesoscale interactions under historical climate conditions

Main interests related to current project:

Funded project by the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council, (NSERC, Canada) in which both dynamical downscaling model (RCMs) and statistical downscaling tool (multisite) will be used to develop probabilistic assessment of regional changes in climate variability and extremes over Canada, in collaboration with ENSEMBLES European (RT2B/RT3 group) & US NARCCAP.

Team members (Canadian and partners) : Pr. VTV Nguyen (McGill), P. Gachon & X. Zhang (EC), Prs R. Laprise & C. Jones (UQAM), Prs TBMJ Ouarda & A. St-Hilaire (INRS-ÉTÉ), Pr. W. Hsieh (UBC), C. Goodess (CRU, UK), L. Mearns (NCAR, US), J. Christensen (DMI, Danemark) & G. Flato (CCCma, Canada).

Use of NARCCAP data and main objectives related to our current projects:

The main objectives and the current applications of RCMs simulations will be:

1. To analyse and validate the RCMs with others models over Canada based on climate extremes (current period)
2. To intercompare RCMs with the new generation of multisite statistical downscaling (SD) method developed in Canada and over regions in US in collaboration with NARCCAP;
3. To develop new series of predictors at the regional scale using the RCMs outputs and analyze the added values compared to GCMs atmospheric variables used in SD methods;
4. To discriminate the role of large versus regional scales influence in the occurrence, intensity and duration of extreme events over Canadian areas;
5. To construct high resolution climate changes across various selected regions in Canada with ensembles runs and with uncertainties analysis;
6. To evaluate and quantify the cascade of uncertainty from coarse scale (GCMs) to regional/local scale downscaling model (RCMs and SDs),
7. To help to develop reliable daily time series under climate change conditions for their applications in water resources, agriculture, risk management, and various areas in environmental modeling.

Carlos Gaitan

email: cgaitan@eos.ubc.ca

Research
I work under supervision of Prof. William Hsieh at the University of british Columbia. Our research involves the use of linear and nonlinear methods to statistically downscale coarse resolution data, into finer local scale.
We are affiliated to the NSERC-SRO project, and receive support from OURANOS through the DAI.

Thian Yew Gan

email: tgan@ualberta.ca

Research
We perform necessary statistical analysis of the regional climate data for southern Alberta to obtain its regional IDF (Intensity-Duration-Frequency) curves which will then be applied to an urban hydrologic model, PCSWMM, to study the possible impacts of storms of various return periods, intensity and durations, on the stormwater infrastructure of southern Alberta.

Yang Gao

email: yang.gao@pnnl.gov

I am currently working as Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. I work on dynamical downscaling using regional climate model WRF, and investigate extreme climate weather events and its possible mechanisms.

Research

Working with Dr. Ruby Leung at PNNL, we try to evaluate the orographic effect over the mountain area, in particular during extreme precipitation, from a high resolution regional climate model WRF outputs. In order to explore the robustness of our finding from a single model WRF, we aim to use NARCCAP multiple ensemble model outputs to compare with our simulations.

Yanhong Gao

email: yanhong@hydro.washington.edu

Research

We are working on dynamic downscaling focus on the Colorado River Basin. Initially, we will implement the "standard" climate version of WRF, as used by collaborator Ruby Leung in NARCCAP simulations, and will perform tests to assure that model output for runs equivalent to NARCCAP Phase 1 (reanalysis boundary conditions) are consistent. We will then implement the WRF-VIC version, and will evaluate differences between the "standard" WRF version and WRF-VIC. We will also evaluate differences between WRF-VIC land surface simulations and off-line VIC simulations. Once these initial benchmark runs have been completed, we will implement WRF-VIC for the 20th Century GCM simulations.Our final task will be to evaluate the nature and implications of land surface feedbacks in recent drought years.

Gregg Garfin

email: gmgarfin@email.arizona.edu

Dr. Garfin is a co-investigator on the Climate Assessment for the Southwest (CLIMAS) project. His CLIMAS work includes identifying climate services useful to assisting stakeholders mitigate, cope with, and adapt to climate-related risks. He is trained as a climatologist, dendroclimatologist, and geographer. His research interests include climate change, climate variability, and drought, and the effective delivery of climate science to decision makers. Much of his recent effort has been devoted to scientist-stakeholder processes that inform risk management and prepare for drought and adaptation to climate changes.

Dr. Garfin is a contributor to the U.S. Climate Change Science Program's Synthesis and Assessment Product 5.3. From 2003-2007, he served as co-chair of Arizona's drought monitoring technical committee. In 2004, he served as a member of the integrated team for the development of a National Integrated Drought Information System. He is also a climate science co-chair for the Arizona Water Institute.

Research

I am representating three projects with interests in using NARCCAP data: the Climate Assessment for the Southwest (CLIMAS) project, the University of Arizona Institute for the Study of Planet Earth (ISPE), and a National Institute for Climate Change Research (NICCR) project on future vegetation changes in the Colorado Plateau. My CLIMAS and ISPE colleagues propose to use NARCCAP data in the following ways:

1. To help stakeholders in the southwestern United States prepare for climate changes, in particular, water management and ecosystem management adaptation planning. As an example, we are working closely with the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality on a climate change adaptation plan for the state, and NARCCAP output will undoubtedly assist in this process.
2. We would like to present NARCCAP images, and perhaps data subsets, on our forthcoming climate change website. If feasible and permissible, we are interested in including NARCCAP output in a climate data explorer tool, which would allow users to peruse the data, in order to examine regions, parameters, and time periods of interest.
3. In public presentations about projected climate changes for the Southwest.
4. As inputs to research on potential climate change economic impacts to water resources, agriculture, tourism, and ranching. These projects are being conducted by CLIMAS colleagues Bonnie Colby and George Frisvold, as part of the CLIMAS 2007-2012 Phase III.

The NICCR project specifically requires fine spatial-scale data on projected temperature (minimum and maximum), precipitation, humidity, and evapotranspiration. These parameters will be input to a species-specific vegetation model, in order to project future changes in plant species range.

Leverett Garing Garing

email: llgaring@ncsu.edu

I am a graduate student studying atmospheric sciences at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. Currently, I am enrolled in Dr. Fredrick Semazzi's class titled, "Climate Risk Analysis and Adaptation."

Research

The NARCCAP data will be used for a course project in Dr. Fredrick Semazzi's class. The course project will look at climate change impacts on the ski resorts in Boone, NC area. The variables of interest are wet bulb temperature and dry bulb temperature values for the Boone, NC area. Expect to find that the wet bulb temperatures and the dry bulb temperatures are increasing based on model projects; thus, meaning that the number of snow making days is decreasing.

Omar Gates

email: gateso@umich.edu

I am currently a Masters student at the University of Michigan. I am asking for permission to access this data for a class project I am starting for my research. This project is the starting point of my future research as well.

Research

The research question that is trying to be answer is as follows: Can current regional climate models be able to predict/resolve severe thunderstorm or tornado parameters well? The significance of this research is to gain a further understanding into whether current regional climate models can illustrate the specific parameters that are associated with severe convective systems. The use of the Weather Research Forecasting Model Table 5 data will be used to assess different parameters, such as wind shear, vorticity, and moist static energy, to figure if the model outputs are close to the reanalysis data available. Comparison of this data to other models will be the future hopes for the study as well.

Mahesh Gautam

email: mahesh.gautam@dri.edu

Research

I am a hydrologist/water resources engineer and work as a researcher at DRI and currently working on two projects on climate change impact assessments: the first one is to evaluate impact of climate change on flood frequency, and the other on drought and water management issues in the Southwest US.

Jason Geck

email: jgeck@alaskapacific.edu

PhD Student at University of Alaska, Fairbanks
Faculty member at Alaska Pacific University

Research

Looking at using RCM output within a mass balance model to evaluate Eklutna Glacier extent/volume and runoff variation. Unclear on RCM output to be used until compared to time overlap local met station data.

Victor Gensini

email: vgensini@uga.edu
website: http://vgensini.myweb.uga.edu

Research

I anticipate using NARCCAP data to try to simulate impacts of climate change on convective environments in the U.S. This will be accomplished by furthern downscaling using the WRF model. Additionally, we will be using NARCCAP data to follow up on Willis Shem's previous work.

Matei Georgescu

email: mateig@stanford.edu

Ph.D. Rutgers University, 2008
Postdoctoral Scholar Stanford University, 2008-Present

Research

My main focus is to evaluate the direct climate impact of U.S. biofuels via a regional climate modeling approach. The initial paper stemming from this project was recently published in GRL:

Georgescu, M., D. B. Lobell, and C. B. Field (2009), Potential impact of U.S. biofuels on regional climate, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L21806, doi: 10.1029/2009GL040477.

More recently, I have used the latest version of the WRF-ARW (version 3.1) to conduct seasonal, medium-resolution (32-km grid spacing) simulations to study the impact of land-use change associated with U.S. biofuels.

Via a simple parameterization of perennial grasses (e.g., switchgrass) my immediate focus - and for which I need NARCCAP data - is to compare the seasonal climate effect resulting from a substitution of annual crops with perennial crops (used as biofuels) with downscaled future climate scenarios courtesy of NARCCAP.

Eric Gilleland

email: ericg@ucar.edu
website: http://www.ral.ucar.edu/~ericg/

Research Applications Laboratory
National Center for Atmospheric Research

Research

My interest is in studying environments conducive to severe weather under a changing climate. Currently, I am looking at global reanalysis of a derivative of convective available potential energy (CAPE); specifically, Wmax=sqrt(2*CAPE); along with 0-6 km wind shear (shear). In particular, concurrently high values of these variables have been found to be associated with severe storms.

Nathan Gillett

email: Nathan.Gillett@ec.gc.ca
website: http://www.cccma.ec.gc.ca/people/ngillett.shtml

Research

Attribution of regional climate change over North America using regional model output

Research questions:

• Are regional models better than global climate models at:
  • Reproducing the mean state in temperature, precipitation.
  • Reproducing observed climate changes in temperature, precipitation?
• Validate against monthly mean station data - climatology and trends.
• Can RCM output be used in an attribution of North American temperature and/or precipitation changes? (having only an NCEP-forced run will present a challenge).

Methods: Optimal detection and attribution methods (e.g. Allen and Stott, 2003) will be used to attempt to separate that part of regional climate change which has been forced by chaning boundary conditions from that part associated with internal variability. 20th century simulations will be validated against North American station data to validate the climatology using RMS errors, correlations and other measures. Results will be compared with a similar analysis applied directly to the NCEP reanalysis itself.

Research Plan: Research to be carried out over 2009-2011.

Data: Primarily monthly mean precip and temperature from NCEP-forced simulations, though other data may be investigated.

Alice Gilliland

email: Gilliland.Alice@epamail.epa.gov

Alice Gilliland, Ph.D.
Chief, Model Evaluation and Applications Branch
Atmospheric Modeling Division
National Exposure Research Laboratory
U.S. EPA Office of Research and Development
USEPA Mailroom E243-01
109 T.W. Alexander Drive
Research Triangle Park, NC 27711
(919) 541-0347

Research

Main research goals: We are interested in future climate-related changes in atmospheric wet deposition of nutrients. We have some air quality and atmospheric deposition modeling results that rely on a regional downscaling scenario developed by Dr. Ruby Leung (see Leung and Gustafson, 2005; Gustafson and Leung, 2007). We would like to look at a range of precipitation pattern changes (current to future under A1B and A2 scenarios) to consider how different the wet deposition estimates of nutrients might be with different regional climate scenarios.

Research methods and plan: Our current regional-scale air quality modeling results include estimates of wet deposition of aerosol species, based on the regional downscaled results I mentioned above. Using a statistical model of wet deposition based on precipitation volume, we plan to estimate how different the model predicted deposition amounts would vary based on the NARCCAP precipitation fields.

What data are needed: We primarily just need the precipitation fields from the NARCCAP results.

Anticipated findings or significance of work: We hope to get a better feeling for how different the wet removal of air pollutants may be with different downscaled regional climate results and different IPCC scenarios.

Evan Girvetz

email: girvetz@u.washington.edu
website: http://faculty.washington.edu/girvetz/

Evan H. Girvetz
Postdoctoral Research Associate
College of Forest Resources
University of Washington
Box 352100
Seattle, WA 98195-2100

Research Interests:
Climate change impacts and adaptation assessment
Landscape Ecology
Geographic Information Systems
Decision support tool development
Statistical Analysis

Research

Research Goals:
Although there is overwhelming evidence of climate change and policy responses are being discussed, natural resource managers have found it difficult to develop management and planning responses to both recent and likely future climate changes. One reason for this slow response is the absence of tools that translate cutting-edge climate science and climate-model simulations into a form that a manager can work with at a local or regional scale (CCSP 2008). Although large amounts of data exist regarding how climate has and is projected to change at specific places globally, these data are stored in databases that can be difficult to access. Furthermore, although analytical techniques are available for quantifying the potential effects of these changes, many require significant computing resources and analytical expertise. Scientists, managers, and policy makers (i.e. practitioners) need the ability to assess the potential effects of climate change on specific ecological systems within specific geographic areas at relevant spatial scales. However, a major gap exists between the need for and the accessibility of practical climate change analysis tools.

Research methods:
I use computer-based technologies to develop tools that make climate-change analysis more accessible, practical, and useful. These technologies include geographic information systems (GIS), statistical analysis platforms (e.g. the R Project), and web-based mapping services (e.g. Google Maps, KML/GML, and SOAP). Specifically, I am developing a framework and web-based mapping tool for practical climate-change analysis, called ClimateWizard, that anyone can easily use to analyze climate change at a given site(s) around the world (in collaboration with researchers at The Nature Consevancy and University of Southern Mississippi). The ClimateWizard is freely available as an interactive website that produces climate-change maps, graphs, and tables (http://ClimateWiz.org). It provides access to a wide range of climate data (both past observed and future modeled) and runs statistical analyses that address relevant ecological questions within specific geographic areas. The ClimateWizard uses two common approaches to representing climate-change data: (1) comparing climate in a given year or time period to a baseline period (climatic departures); and (2) calculating statistical climatic trends over a time period of interest using linear regression analysis.

The ClimateWizard tool was designed to be accessible to a wide range of users, allowing virtually anyone to perform simple climate analyses for anywhere data are available. Users can select an analysis area from a set of provided base data layers (administrative and ecological boundaries), they can upload an ESRI Shapefile, or they can draw directly on the web-mapping interface. The ClimateWizard uses ArcGIS SOAP web-services to access a time-series database of climate information stored on a remote computer server, and then uses the server's computing power to create outputs in the form of graphs, maps, tables, and GIS data layers tailored to the specific climate-change question being asked by the user.

Research Plans:
I am interested in the possiblity of using ClimateWizard to analyse, visualize and explore the NARCCAP data.

Gashaw Gismu

email: ggismu@yahoo.com

I am an assistant lecturer, and now I am learning my masters programme.

Research

I want to conduct research on climate change using the SWAT model.

James Glenn

email: jglenn1@ou.edu

Senior undergraduate student at the University of Oklahoma. Double major in Meteorology and GIS. On track to graduate in May 2013.

Research

The main purpose of this research is to analyze climatological changes in evapotranspiration over the Great Plains using latent heat flux. Historical and future data will be used to analyze the historical changes and the future outlook for evapotranspiration in the region. ET is important in the Great Plains because it has a significant impact on irrigation and other farming practices, as well as playing a major role in the water budget and hydrologic cycle.

It is anticipated that there will be a significant decrease in ET over time as climate change reduces annual rainfall amounts and increases average temperatures in the Great Plains. This research can provide farmers and municipalities with another indicator of the future state of their lands and can help them better prepare for the future.

Michael Glotter

email: glotter@uchicago.edu

Research
My current work involves assessing the impacts of climat change through a large-scale gridded crop model. I run my crop model with various climate products to better understand the necessary climate output and downscaling techniques in an impact assessment. I am coupling the NARCCAP data with corresponding GCM output from the CMIP3 archive, specifically looking at the CCSM3 and CGCM3 GCMs, along with the CRCM and WRFG RCMs. I hope to find the importance of dynamically downscaling GCM output in future agricultural impacts.

Peter Golden

email: Peteggolden@gmail.com

M.Eng Student at Dalhousie University (Halifax, Canada)

Research

Studying Effects on small watershed hydrology in Nova Scotia using regional climate models and SWAT (Soil Water Assesment Tool).

A Goldman

email: amygoldman@gmail.com

Research
I am interested in seeing how simulations of the northeastern United States compare to ring-width from western Massachusetts tree cores.

Don Goldstein

email: dgoldste@allegheny.edu
website: http://sites.allegheny.edu/dongoldstein/new-new-economy-for-a-warming-region/

Research
The project explores a set of possible climate adaptation paths for private and public entities in northwestern Pennsylvania, a part of the southern Great Lakes region. Regional climate adaptation is analyzed as a function of two kinds of factors: existing, geographically specific economic assets and capabilities; and expected direct and indirect climate impacts at the regional level. NARCCAP climate projections for the Great Lakes region will be used in identifying a range of likely direct climate impacts.

Main research goal: Provide conceptual tools and plausible, opportunistic scenarios for private and public decision makers in strengthening a regional system of adaptive innovation.
Research methods: Integrate regional climate projections with key regional economic data suggested by the literatures on organizational capabilities, innovation clusters, and institutional configurations.
Research plan and data:
Direct climate impacts - construct a regionally specific application using early, middle, and late century projections from models at the best available scales (NARCCAP's Great Lakes; USGCRP's Great Lakes; the Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment's Pennsylvania and New York State reports).
Indirect climate impacts - identify and project key systemic, climate-related parameters likely to be salient for regional adaptation (relative energy prices; carbon, renewable energy, and intermodal transportation policies; relative regional water supplies and policies across the U.S.).
Regional assets and capabilities - inventory technological, labor supply, infrastructure, and other resources (planned online survey of several thousand business respondents via the Erie Chamber of Commerce; stakeholder interviews; searches of archival press and economic data sources).

Anticipated findings: Given systemic pressures for lower-carbon energy and transportation and the region's location along rail and inland shipping corridors, its major precision machining industry, and its proximity to Lake Erie wind resources, adaptation could revolve around enhanced intermodal transportation infrastructure, offshore wind, and machining capabilities scaled up for the large work required to build and maintain these industries. This path would require significant stakeholder collaborations and both private and public investments, undertaken in the face of uncertainty about critical variables like expected Great Lakes levels and extreme weather events.
Anticipated significance: Create an analytical framework that can help to reframe climate change in terms of adaptive innovation and opportunity, at the local levels where public opinion is formed and exercised.

Justin Goldstein

email: Justin.C.Goldstein-1@ou.edu

Research
I'm investigating the hydrologic impacts of biofuel production in the Southern US under climate change.

Scott Goodrick

email: sgoodrick@fs.fed.us

Research
Interested in using the NARCCAP data for examining potential changes in fire regimes in the southeastern united states due to climate change. Will likely also use the data to potentially drive air quality models to examine air quality impacts of future fire regimes.

Ranjith Gopalakrishnan

email: ranjith7@vt.edu

Research
I am working on a project that is assessing the possible impacts of climate change on southern pine forests. We plan to use various land-models and such for this. Hence, I would be accessing the NAPCCAP database for inputs about possible climate scenarios of the future.

Nichole Gosselin

email: nmckinne@slu.edu

I am a teaching Assistant at Saint Louis University.

Research

For my Master's thesis I would like to look at the effects of climate change on soil carbon stocks in the United States. To accomplish this, I will be using the DAYCENT model, a daily time-step version of the Century model, a soil organic matter model that also simulates soil fluxes of C, N2O, NOx, and CH4. I would like to use the NARCCAP HRM3(hadcm3) current and future datasets to look at how the changing climate will affect soil carbon. The model needs daily maximum and minimum temperature as well as precipitation. We have done similar research using different climate datasets, but would like to use a regional climate model for the climate data for this experiment.

Anne Graham

email: grahama@mit.edu

Research
I will be helping researchers find the data they need. If they end up using NARCCAP data, I will help them register for their own accounts.

Mark Green

email: mgreen@stcatharines.ca

Research
The data will be used in a climate change vulnerability assessment on an urban stormwater system. The main goal of the research is to predict stormwater impacts in St. Catharines, Niagara, Ontario, Canada, based on climate change scenarios. The NARCCAP data will be used to update the existing hydrologic models. The hydrologic data will be used in a continuous simulation to predict water quality and quantity (flooding) under climate change scenarios. XPSWMM software will be used for the flooding analysis. The anticipated outcome is an identification of areas with increased flooding risk and infrastructure requirements.

Pamela Green

email: pgreen@ccny.cuny.edu

Research
We are running water balance models for the US and want to use the NARCCAP climate forcings.

Scott Greene

email: jgreene@ou.edu
website: http://www.ocgi.okstate.edu/owpi

I am a professor of geography at the University of Oklahoma and co-director of the Oklahoma Wind Power Initiative. I have also spent many years researching links between climate and human health, especially in the area of heat-related mortality.

University of Oklahoma
100 E. Boyd St., Suite 410
Norman, OK 73019
Tel: +1 (405) 325-8870
FAX: +1 (405) 325-6090

Research

The main part of our research efforts are to investigate the impacts of climate change on the wind fields, and more specifically, the patterns of potential wind energy production in the southern plains and beyond.

Giovanna Grossi

email: giovanna.grossi@unibs.it

Research

Climate and climate change data will be used to investigate the effects of climate change on soil erosion and sediment transport and production. For this experiment sub-daily precipitation, temperature, wind speed, radiation, and dew point temperature data are needed.

Susanne Grossman-Clarke

email: sg.clarke@asu.edu

Assistant Research Professor, Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State University

Research

Our research is related to an NSF sponsored grant, "Collaborative Research: Urban Vulnerability to Climate Change: A System Dynamics Analysis" (No. GEO-0816168).

The goal of our work is to assess potential future heat related hazards for people living in the Phoenix metropolitan region. Therefore we plan to conduct high resolution downscaling of global coupled model output for selected heat events. We will also investigate interactions of potential future climate and urban land use change and their effects on near-surface air temperatures and humidity.

CCSM projections downscaled to a 50 km resolution with WRF are analyzed in order to identify heat events that are characterized as potentially hazardous (for example extreme day and/or night time temperatures, duration of extreme temperature episodes). For those situations we will conduct high-resolution WRF downscaling.

Understanding the effects of potential climate change and urban land use changes on near-surface air temperature is particularly important in this arid region in order to enhance the adaptive capacity of a city that regularly experiences high average daily summertime temperatures and extended periods without rainfall. Large segments of the population are well adapted to extreme heat through access to air conditioning in their homes. However, Phoenix region studies show that minorities with higher poverty rates experience high vulnerability to extreme heat because of lower economic means to adjust to high temperatures as well as higher air temperatures in their neighborhoods.

Trevor Grout

email: tgrout@usgs.gov

Research
Climate change and hydrology relationships. Perform various studies for the USGS, the new Climate Science Center and etc.
Will use climate model data and apply to hydrologic model to determine potential impacts to streams throughout the southern united states.

Lanli Guo

email: lanli.guo@dfo-mpo.gc.ca

Research
We want to investigate the possible impacts of the future climate change over the Canadian Maritime region. We plan to drive ocean model OPA by using NARCCAP's data as the atmospheric forcing.

Kemal Gurer

email: kgurer@arb.ca.gov
website: http://www.arb.ca.gov

I received my Ph.D in Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and working as a research scientist at California Air Resources Board, located at Sacramento, California. My research interests are varied, including turbulence over complex terrain, the evolution of atmospheric boundary layer, effect of sea breeze and other atmospheric flows on the advection of contaminants, weather forecast, and the use of satellite and lidar on mapping boundary layer processes.

Research

I am working on the effect of surface fluxes on the evolution of the boundary layer flow, and ultimately the effects of atmospheric flow on the generation of secondary pollutants and the transport of both primary and secondary pollutants. I am using MM5 and WRF meteorological models to generate the input data for CMAQ photochemical model, which gives a different response in generation of certain secondary chemicals as a response to different soil moisture and temperature. Both meteorological models use predetermined tables to initialize the soil moisture and temperature depending on land use and land cover. I would like to be able to examine available soil data that you have, compare it with the amounts on the tables, and distribute the variable information over the modeling domain. I could not find any soil moisture and temperature data in California, especially at several depths, and I am currently looking for this particular data. Using the NARCCAP data, I hope to improve the initialization of the meteorological model.

Sunil Gurrapu

email: gurrapus@uregina.ca

Research
The primary objective of my research is to investigate the trends in extreme flows of the rivers in the southern Prairies and to evaluate the impact of SST indices on the frequency of extreme flow events. The purpose of this project is to develop an empirical model to account for the variability in streamflow in the rivers in southern Prairies based on the analysis of instrumental and longer proxy hydrometric records. This empirical model will be used to identify the processes, primarily SST indices, driving hydroclimate variability and to estimate the departures in the projected mean conditions of hydroclimate, obtained from the future climate simulations of Global and Regional Climate models (GCM/RCMs).

Ethan Gutmann

email: gutmann@ucar.edu

NCAR ASP Postdoctoral Fellow

Research

I will be applying a statistical downscaling to the NARCCAP 50km WRF-NCEP run over Colorado. I will develop the downscaling using 2 years of data for which I have substantial ancillary data, then apply it to a >10-year window, and compare the results to point observations. If this downscaling is successful, I will try this same procedure with the WRF-CCSM current climate runs, and then apply it to the WRF-CCSM future climate runs. Eventually this procedure could be applied to other RCMs and Climate models as well.

David Gutzler

email: gutzler@unm.edu

University of New Mexico

I'm particularly interested in seasonal/interannual/decadal variability and predictability, and how such variability might be affected by longer-term anthropogenic climate change.

Research

I have developed regional-scale climate change scenarios for the western U.S. derived from CMIP3 A1B-forced linear trends, with historical interannual variability superimposed on the model-generated trends. I'd like to compare these results with the output from NARCCAP simulations. I'm also interested in using the NARCCAP output to look more explicitly at surface hydrologic variability (snowpack and derived streamflow projections).

Andrew Halmstad

email: halmstad@cecs.pdx.edu

Graduate Student
Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science
Portland State University
Portland, OR

Research

NARCCAP data will be used in a project that is focused on comparing multiple downscaling techniques. Currently both dynamical and statistical methods will be addressed in this research. Surface temperature and precipitation will be the primary candidates of interest for this study. The data will also be used as inputs for the hydrologic modeling of watersheds in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States.

The goal of this work is to determine the advantages and drawbacks of various downscaling techniques as they relate to the prediction of surface temperature and precipitation on multiple spatial scales.

Derrick Hambly

email: djhambly@uwaterloo.ca

Research
I am particularly interested in the relationship between inclement weather and automobile crashes, as well as the potential implications of climate change for weather-related crash risk. While the former has been well documented in the literature, the latter has not. My research thus aims to provide a first estimate of the possible effects of climate change, specifically changing rainfall patterns, on road safety in Canadian cities.

Healy Hamilton

email: hhamilton@calacademy.org
website: http://research.calacademy.org/cabi

Our lab at California Academy of Sciences is focused on forecasting climate change impacts to species and ecosystems. We generate bioclimactic envelopes for conservation target species, and apply downscaled climate model outputs to assessing geographic range shifts. We are using several methods to address uncertainty in ecological forecasts, including generating future gridded climate surfaces from multimodel ensembles outputs.

Research

Our lab is interested in creating a large number of gridded future climate surfaces at relatively fine spatial resolution (1-10km2) for ecological forecasting. We are interested in a subset of NARCCAP data that is most manageable and relevant for ecological forecasting, such as tasmax and tasmin, huss, prtot, mrso, and snd. We will convert the outputs from most of these variables to monthly values, and use them in various species distribution modeling algorithms. Our biggest need is for NARCCAP data to be converted to a common grid format before we begin downloading and processing the data. I was a participant in the second NARCCAP user workshop and we are now gearing up to begin working with NARCCAP outputs. All of our derived NARCCAP data products will be available in GIS format for the biodiversity user community via a website we are currently building for other spatial climate datasets we have created, EcoClim.org.

Dorit Hammerling

email: hammerling@samsi.info

We are a group of researchers from various institutions participating in the 2009 SAMSI program on Space-time Analysis for Environmental Mapping, Epidemiology and Climate Change. Our sub-working group, led by Bruno Sanso from the University of California Santa Cruz, is focused on applying spatio-temporal statistical methods to regional climate model simulations within NARCCAP.

Research

We plan on comparing different regional climate models through an impact analysis of climate stress. The measures of climate stress will be either extended periods of high temperatures (heat waves) or a combination of extended periods of high temperatures, extended periods without precipitation and wind speed relevant to the occurence of forest fires. Our region of interest is the South-West of the United States including Arizona, California, Nevada and Utah.

Jonathan Hanes

email: jmhanes@uwm.edu

Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Research

My main research goal is to assess the potential effects of climate change on forest phenology during the spring and early summer. I plan on implementing the climate data from the GCM runs into a canopy development model to examine the potential effects of climate change on canopy development. The results from this project will contribute to our understanding of how climate change may affect forest canopy development under a variety of climate scenarios.

John Hanesiak

email: johnhanesiak@gmail.com
website: http://www.ccrnetwork.ca/science-programme/research-themes/index.php

Dr. Hanesiak studies storms, extreme weather, mesoscale processes, and surface-atmosphere interactions. His research mainly relates to warm season processes, including convection initiation, thunderstorms and associated severe weather, as well as surface contributions via evapotranspiration and mesoscale boundaries.

Dr. Hanesiak is a professor in the Department of Environment and Geography at the University of Manitoba in Canada.

Research

The NARCCAP data will be used as part of research undertaken by the Changing Cold Regions Network (CCRN)in Canada.

CCRN is a new collaborative research network bringing together the unique expertise of a team of over 50 university and government scientists, including 36 Canadian scientists representing 4 government agencies and 8 universities, as well as 15 international scientists. The network is funded for 5 years through the Climate Change and Atmospheric Research (CCAR) Initiative of NSERC.

CCRN’s objectives are to integrate existing and new sources of data with improved predictive and observational tools to understand, diagnose and predict interactions amongst the cryospheric, ecological, hydrological, and climatic components of the changing Earth system at multiple scales, with a geographic focus on Western Canada’s rapidly changing cold interior.

In particular, we intend to use output from the regional climate models to drive a coupled cloud and hail model (HAILCAST) to investigate changes in convective activity and hail over the CCRN study area, and ultimately over the N. American domain covered by NARCCAP. This research will contribute to the objectives for Theme D "Analysis and Prediction of Regional- and Large-Scale Variability and Change".

Adel Hanna

email: ahanna@unc.edu

Director, Center for Environmental Modeling for Policy Development
Institute for the Environment
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-6116

Research

Title: Effects of Climate Change on Human Health: Current and Future Impacts

Description: In this project we examine how climatic variations and the corresponding air quality conditions may aggravate heat- and cold-related morbidity among adults and vulnerable populations: in particular, the poor, the aging and children. We will demonstrate our analysis in the state of North Carolina. North Carolina displays substantial variability in weather (mountains to seaboard), population density (rural versus urban/suburban), and regional patterns of land use (urban/suburban versus forest versus agricultural).

Objectives/Hypothesis: The overall goal of the proposed research project is to define more precisely the interrelationships among (a) changes in climate and meteorological conditions, (b) air pollution, and (c) heat- and cold-related morbidity severe enough to warrant clinical contact. A secondary goal is to evaluate heat-related morbidity in a vulnerable population: children and adults under economic disadvantage. We propose a novel approach that views climate trends and the associated weather in terms of eight identified air-mass/weather types. We hypothesize that such air masses and the corresponding air quality conditions will have different health impacts on humans, which can be quantified based on statistical analyses of the correlates among the meteorological, climate, air quality, and health data.

Approach: Our work will consist of the following steps: (1) Characterize weather patterns and circulation types over the state of North Carolina; (2) examine temporal and regional variability in meteorological and climatological patterns of the state of North Carolina to identify abnorm

Data Needed: Hourly surface meteorological data (temperature, winds, pressure, etc.) for one or two future years (year 2040 or after)

Expected Results: We anticipate that the characteristics of the climate . air pollution relationship across North Carolina over time will be generalizable throughout the US, and that our proposed study will yield important insights regarding the impact of climate change and air pollution on heat- and cold-related morbidity, thus advancing our knowledge of the health effects of climate change and their predictability. Findings on applying environmental and climate data to decrease heat- and cold-related morbidity could result in a substantial public health impact, not just in North Carolina but throughout the United States.

Walter Hannah

email: whannah1@gmail.com
website: http://maloney.atmos.colostate.edu/whannah/

Research

My use of NARCCAP data will be to obtain regional estimates of precipitation changes in future scenarios in order to constrain parameters for experimental economic forecast models. I am an atmospheric scientist by training, but I'm branching out and collaborating with some economists that study water resource management.

Janel Hanrahan

email: janel.hanrahan@lyndonstate.edu

Research
The NARCCAP data will be used for educational and research purposes at Lyndon State College. We plan to use the RCM output to investigate historic and future variability in local (New England) climate variables such as temperature and precipitation. In addition the RCM output may be used to further dynamically downscale climate data using WRF. The faculty in the Atmospheric Sciences Department at LSC will use the NARCAPP data as an educational tool for exploring local impacts of climate variability. These data may also be used by undergraduate students for independent research thesis projects.

Keith Harding

email: hardi091@umn.edu

Research
The expansion of irrigation in the North American Great Plains has threatened the sustainability of the Ogallala Aquifer. Irrigation has been previously shown to result in the largest net loss of water during drought years. Droughts in the Great Plains are expected to increase in prevalence and severity due to climate change, likely causing accelerated stress on the Ogallala Aquifer. Our study aims to determine the full impact of irrigation on the hydrologic cycle in a world of expected increased drought intensity using future climate scenarios in the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. The use of NARCCAP data will allow for comparison between control simulations and previously simulated NARCCAP data.

Daryn Hardwick

email: hada1102@stcloudstate.edu

Research
I will be attempting to discover future spatial distributions of plants using the various scenarios of climate change.

Monica Harkey

email: mkharkey@wisc.edu

Research
I will be investigating how climate change might affect air quality in the U.S. I will be using NARCAAP data as input into the WRF model as a first step towards modeling air quality (via the CMAQ model) and health effects of future climate change. We will be focusing on the 2050s and what the ozone and PM 2.5 concentrations may be on a regional scale (Eastern U.S., on a 12 km grid).

Jacob Harrel

email: harrelj@onid.orst.edu

OCCRI Researcher

Research

Comparing CMIP5 data

Jane Harvill

email: jane_harvill@baylor.edu

Associate professor, Statistical Science, Baylor University
Ph.D. in Statistics from Texas A&M

Research

I work in spatial and spatio-temporal statistics; in particular, in nonparametric modeling and prediction of such data in both the time and frequency domains. Currently, I am involved in a grant through Sandia Research Laboratory that is using these statistical techniques to model and predict global horizontal irradiance (GHI) for the purposes of predicting electrical output at solar energy plants. The weather plays a huge role in GHI. So one use for this data would be to incorporate weather information into our models.

Linnia Hawkins

email: linnia.hawkins@gmail.com

I am an undergraduate student at Montana State University in the Department of Mathematics (Statistics).

Research

I am doing a project for a multivariate analysis class which will assess temporal and spacial changes in climate. For this project I intend to create distance matrices from yearly multivariate climate data (temperature, precipitation, etc.) and examining the temporal and spacial relationship. Work is not intended for publication.

Lingli He

email: linglihe@umich.edu

Research
My project compares historical RCM simulations from NARCCAP (North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program) and simulations from their host global GCM to NLDAS (North American Land Data Assimilation System) dataset over the Great Lake Regions. Important land surface variables such as precipitation, soil moisture, evapotranspiration, and temperature will be examined. (I will choose one or two variables depending on the chance of collaboration with others).

Yufei He

email: yh4u@virginia.edu

Graduate student, Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia

Research

My thesis is focusing on understanding the interactions between shrub ecroachment and microclimate of southwestern US. Other than micrometeorological tower and tethered balloon measurements, we also use regional model to investigate the feedbacks and try to couple it with a vegetation model to predict land cover change in decadal time scale under the scenario that climate is the only driver to shrub ecroachment. We are interested to use NARCCAP data to study the changes of minimum temperature of southwestern US and its relationship to shrub encroachment.

Zachary Heern

email: zheern@siu.edu

Research
I am a research assistant working on a collaborative NSF grant between Southern Illinois University and Indiana University that is looking at the effects of climate change on regional wind climates. My adviser and I are interested in understanding how extra-tropical cyclones affect regional climate.

Sam Heft-Neal

email: sheftneal@berkeley.edu

Research
While an increasing number of studies have examined the historical relationship between climate and agricultural output, I am interested in the relationship between climate and livestock productivity.
I am in the process of collecting provincial-level historical production data for pigs, chickens, cows, and buffalo in Thailand, Lao PDR, Cambodia, and Viet Nam. I would like to incorporate the NARCCAP climate data for SE Asia in order to examine the link between livestock productivity and various measures of temperature/rainfall. In addition, I would like to use future climate scenarios to estimate potential effects on the livestock sector in SE Asia.

Katherine Hegewisch

email: khegewisch@uidaho.edu

Research
We are investigating how different methods of downscaling influence the uncertainty in projected impacts on a region. We are using statistical downscaling methods: BCSD, MACA and the dynamical downscaling from NARCCAP. We are looking at agro-economic metrics for impact assessment.

Majana Heidenreich

email: majana.heidenreich@tu-dresden.de
website: http://tu-dresden.de/meteorologie

Research
- analysis of climate change for the state of durango (mexico) using data from the model combinations HadCM3/HRM3 and GFDL/HRM3 because of domain size - comparision with GCM-AR4 data - the results are one input for the development of adaptation strategies in agriculture for tow study sites near Durango city and Gomez Palacio

Brian Helmuth

email: helmuth@biol.sc.edu
website: http://climate.biol.sc.edu

Professor
Department of Biological Sciences
Columbia, SC 29208 USA
Ph: (803) 777-2100
Fax: (803) 777-4002
http://www.biol.sc.edu/~helmuthlab

Research

Ecological Forecasting of Effects of Climate Change on Coastal Ecosystems

My research explores the effects of climate and climate change on the physiology and ecology of marine organisms. Specifically, I use thermal engineering techniques, including a combination of field work, remote sensing and mathematical modeling, to explore the ways in which the environment determines the body temperatures of coastal marine animals such as mussels and seastars. A major goal of this approach (funded by NASA and NOAA) is to predict where and when the effects of climate change are likely to occur so that we can mitigate these effects, a method of "ecological triage". To date my work has centered primarily on temperate rocky intertidal systems in the United States and Europe.

Our work has shown some surprising results, and has suggested that our expectations of where to look for the effects of climate change in nature can be more complex than previously anticipated. For example, our research has shown that along the Pacific coast of the U.S., animal temperatures at sites in Oregon and Washington can be as hot or hotter than sites much farther to the south in California, due to the complex interaction of weather and tides in the region. As a result, we should not necessarily expect to see mortality at the southern ends of species range boundaries, but also at these "hot spots." This complexity suggests that unless we know where and when to look for impacts of climate change, many early impacts could go unnoticed.

I will use NARCCAP data as input data to biophysical heat budget models to predict the body temperatures of intertidal organisms which, when combined with physiological information, will produce spatially and temporally explicit predictions of growth, reproduction, and survival in ecologically key species.

Amanda Hering

email: ahering@mines.edu

Research
I would like to investigate the impact of climate change on the wind resource and assess the variability in those changes anticipated from multiple climate models. To address the first goal, I would like to develop/implement methods for visualizing the trends in a given climate model over both space and time. Ideally, these trends could also be quantified. Then as of 07/28/11, eight regional climate models are publicly available with speed and direction at 10 meters agl. I would like to investigate whether there are significant spatial and temporal differences between these models in terms of wind resource changes.

Sixto Herrera

email: sixtohg@gmail.com

Research
As a consecuence of our participation in some fire-related projects we are interesting in databases containing some specific variables (pr, tas, hurs and wss) in order to build the Canadian Fire Weather Index. This fire risk index must be built with noon values of the temperature, relative humidity and wind speed. Most of the actual databases only store daily mean values of these variables leading to an underestimation of the index and other problems associated to threshold dependent parameters.
The NARCCAP databases contains all the information needed to realize a significance study with this index, showing the main limitations of the daily mean values and other proxies used actually.

Maria Herrmann

email: masha.herrmann@gmail.com

Sigma Space/NASA GSFC and The Pennsylvania State University

Research

I work with the Chesapeake Bay Program to look at the effect of climate change on the Chesapeake Bay watershed. We are analyzing the output of the Chesapeake Bay watershed model (HSPF 5.3) forced with climate projections from several climate models forced with SRES A2 emissions scenario. I would like to make a comparison of HSPF climate projections to the NARCCAP mid-century stream flow projections in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. We anticipate, that NARCCAP flow projections will have more modes flow reductions than what we are finding with HSPF simulations.

Daryl Herzmann