CRD’s Michael Wehner Gives Presentation at Climate Workshop

Michael Wehner of CRD’s Scientific Computing Group was selected to give a presentation at a meeting of the Climate Change Working Group at the Tenth Annual CCSM Workshop held June 21-23 in Breckenridge, Colo.

The workshop is held annually for the Community Climate System Model (CCSM) project, which has been developed under the NSF’s and DOE’s sponsorship at NCAR, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as part of the U.S. Global Change Research Program and the U.S. Climate Change Science Program. This year's workshop theme was “Crosscutting Science Using CCSM.”

Wehner’s talk was on “Changes in Daily Surface Air Temperature and Precipitation Extremes in the IPCC AR4.” Last year, Wehner received an NSF grant to characterize the ability of coupled climate models to simulate extreme weather events. The ability of these models to accurately simulate historical climate changes in the twentieth century will determine the credibility of their predictions of climate change during the twenty-first century and beyond.

Wehner’s grant was funded as part of the U.S. Climate Variability and Predictability (CLIVAR) project. A report summarizing aspects of this work will be furnished to the lead authors of the relevant chapters for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Assessment Report Four (IPCC AR4), a comprehensive review of current knowledge about climate change, which will be published in 2007.