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Cleaner Technologies   Energy & Climate Change   TEEH   SESAMS   Indicator Project   Biomass/Waste   Mobility/Pollution   Spectroscopic Approach   Regional Climate   Climate Change Modeling   Kathmandu Valley   CETP   Coal   Mobility   Policy   Urban Systems   Water & Agriculture	Climate Change Modeling   Projects Modeling Atmospheric/Ocean Variability on Decadal Time Scale Predicting Sea-Level Changes Over the Next Century Principal Investigators MIT: P.Stone, E.Eltahir ETH: A.Ohmura, H.Blatter, C.Schar UT: A.Sumi, T.Oki, A.Abe-Ouchi Over the past decade the societal need for more accurate prediction of climate has emerged as one of the greatest challenges in the natural sciences. The need is driven in part by the increasing vulnerability of modern civilization to fluctuations in climate, which have always been present, and in part by the growing evidence that man’s own activities may themselves be causing changes in the environment and climate. The challenge in predicting climate arises from the enormous complexity of the climate system, which encompasses a range of space and time scales far broader than can be handled by even the fastest computers. The result is that even the most sophisticated models must make serious compromises in how the represent the climate system. The need for improving this situation is the driving force behind these projects. "Modeling Atmospheric/Ocean Variability on Decadal Time Scale" Goals/Objectives The goal of this research is to build a high resolution atmosphere/ocean coupled model which can reproduce a different climate from the present in a high spatial resolution. "Predicting Sea-Level Changes Over the Next Century" Over the past century, global mean temperatures and sea levels have been rising. This rise in seal level is generally projected to continue and to accelerate over the next century. Sea-level changes are recognized as one of the major potential impacts of climate change on society. There is a large uncertainty in the projection of seal-level rise. To make accurate projections of seal-level rise requires good knowledge and models of all the different components of the climate system that determine temperature, precipitation and how the land-ice components of the system respond to changes in these quantities. Goals/Objectives Calculation of a “best estimate” of global sea-level rise over the 21st Century by forcing the land-ice and ocean thermal expansion models with output from the new MIT coupled AOGCM, taken from a simulation using a “business-as-usual” global warming scenario Analysis of the uncertainty in the “best estimate” projection of sea-level rise, by repeating the above calculation, but with the forcing taken from a large number of simulations with the IGSM, in which uncertain economic and physical factors are varied. Initiation of the analyses of the suitability of the AGS’ global and regional models for coupling together, by evaluation their uncoupled performance in the current climate Completing the suitability tests of the separate global and regional models Implementing the statistical procedure for downscaling regional climate model output to the glacier scale Evaluation of the benefits of downscaling the climate information used to force the land-ice models Evaluation of the performance of the regional models couple to land-ice models for the current climate Completing and evaluation a pilot experiment with the UT global and regional models couple together to simulate the region around Thailand.