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Program Mission
The mission of the DOE Climate Change Prediction Program (CCPP) is to advance climate change science and improve climate change projections using state-of-the-science coupled climate models, on time scales of decades to centuries and space scales of regional to global.
Program Goal
The CCPP goal is to develop, test, and apply state-of-the-science computer-based global climate simulation models, based on theoretical climate-science foundations and taking advantage of emerging high performance computing and information technologies. The objective is to increase dramatically both the accuracy and the throughput of computer model-based projections of climatic variability and change in order to enable sound decision-making on issues pertaining to future energy use and technology options.
The CCPP contributes directly to the Office of Biological & Environmental Research (BER) Long Term Measure of Scientific Advancement of delivering improved scientific data and models about the potential response of the Earth's climate and terrestrial biosphere to increased greenhouse gas levels for policy makers to determine safe levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
The Program also contributes to the Climate Variability and Change element of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP), and coordinates its activities with the climate modeling programs at other federal agencies, particularly the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration(NASA).
Program Components
Present CCPP research activities are organized into several distinct, but coordinated components.
Long-term Basic Research
Academic Research Grants: The CCPP supports research at universities through a competitive, peer-reviewed grants program. The funded projects are devoted to long-term basic research addressing climate science and, through the CCPP’s association with the DOE Office of Science’s (SC’s) Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) Program, advanced numerical methods useful in climate simulation on high-performance computer systems.
The most recent competition for grants to universities from the CCPP was announced on October 3, 2007 (see Notice 08-05). If funds for an additional competition become available in the future, a new competition will be announced at the DOE SC Grants and Contracts Web Site, as well as being published in the Federal Register.
Climate Model Development and Evaluation
The CCPP development and application projects are focused on the Community Climate System Model (CCSM), a community modeling program based at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The CCSM, which is supported jointly by the NSF and the DOE is a fully-coupled, global climate model that provides state-of-the-science computer simulations of the Earth's past, present, and future climate states.
CCPP Community Climate System Modeling Consortium Project: The DOE Community Climate System Modeling Consortium Project (supported by the DOE SciDAC program through the CCPP) is carried out at six DOE national laboratories (Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Pacific Northwest) and the NCAR. Software engineering is a key focus of the project, including climate model and framework development for petascale computing platforms. The project also supports basic development of ocean, sea ice, atmospheric chemistry (including aerosols), and biogeochemistry models for future CCSM simulations. . Additional information about the project is available at http://www.scidac.org/CCSM/
Climate, Ocean, and Sea Ice Modeling Project: The CCPP sponsors the Climate, Ocean and Sea Ice Modeling Project (COSIM) at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The COSIM project provides the ongoing development and distribution of (1) the Parallel Ocean Program (POP) ocean general circulation model, which is the ocean component of the CCSM; and (2) the LANL Sea Ice Model (CICE), which is the sea ice component of the CCSM. In addition to coupled climate simulations, COSIM researchers apply POP, CICE and other ocean models to a variety of ocean and sea ice problems, including eddy-resolving ocean simulations, studies of the thermohaline circulation, and polar ice feedbacks.
Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison: The CCPP sponsors the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The PCMDI works with national and international model development groups to identify the shortcomings of present climate models by independently providing universal diagnostic tools for evaluating climate model performance. Many of these tools are built into the Climate Data Analysis Tool software package that is freely distributed and used by many groups in the U.S. and Europe. PCMDI also provides major facilities for archiving climate model output, , including the model simulations used for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report, and making it readily accessible to the climate modeling community. The CCPP-ARM Parameterization Testbed (CAPT) at PCMDI uses numerical weather prediction methods to provide
Climate Simulation and Prediction
CCSM Climate Change Working Group Support: The end-product of the CCPP is the simulation and prediction of contemporary climate and possible future climates using the state-of-art coupled climate models. The CCSM version 3 was released in the 2004 performed historical simulations and future century time-scale predictions for the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). CCPP scientists are collaborating on the development of CCSM version 4, which is scheduled for release in 2009. Multi-century simulations are coordinated through the CCSM's Climate Change Working Group, which is co-chaired by CCPP scientists. Results from these simulations are being extensively analyzed by scientists throughout the world and serve as critical input to major national and international assessments of possible future climatic changes. Scientists can obtain the model data through the SciDAC sponsored Earth System Grid portals at NCAR and PCMDI.
Abrupt Climate Change
An abrupt climate change occurs when the climate system is forced across some threshold, triggering a persistent transition to a new state at a rate determined by the climate system itself and faster than the cause . DOE interest is on events where large (i.e., subcontinental) and widespread change occurs within a short period (i.e., a decade). The DOE program, “Investigation of the Magnitudes and Probabilities of Abrupt Climate TransitionS (IMPACTS),” is focusing on examining both attribution of recent past abrupt climate change, as well as potential future abrupt climate change based on climate change projections using dynamical coupled climate models. Areas of current research are: Dynamics of ice shelf — ocean interaction and evaluation of marine ice sheet instability; Boreal/Arctic-climate positive feedbacks and anthropogenic climate change; Rapid destabilization of methane hydrates in Arctic Ocean sediments; and Mega droughts in North America, including the role of biosphere-atmosphere feedbacks.
History
The CCPP is the current phase in the evolution of DOE's long-standing climate modeling and simulation research agenda. The CCPP is focused on developing, testing and applying coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation models (GCMs) for climate simulation and prediction that stay at the leading edge of scientific knowledge and computational technology.
Since the 1970's, the DOE has sponsored coordinated research to advance the science of decadal and longer scale climate prediction. Computer-based simulations of climate are essential to understand and forecast potential climate changes at regional to global scales because the climate system cannot be studied in a laboratory setting. DOE recognized that better climate prediction required advances in the scientific disciplines of physics, chemistry, and meteorology that underpin climate dynamics as well as better computational methods to exploit high-end computer architectures. The origins of the Climate Change Prediction Program (CCPP) were in a modeling project started by the newly formed U.S Department of Energy (DOE) to investigate the environmental effects of CO2 emissions. Starting in 1978, Dr. Warren Washington of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) received funding from the Office of Energy Research (now the Office of Science) to use NCAR’s General Circulation Model (GCM) to perform global climate model simulations with doubled and quadrupled concentrations of atmospheric CO2. In 1989, DOE expanded its activities to include model evaluation and established the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to support analysis of coordinated modeling experiments by the major international climate modeling centers. With the advent of the federal interagency High Performance Computing and Communication and Global Change Research Programs in 1990, DOE initiated the Computer Hardware, Applied Mathematics and Model Physics (CHAMMP) Program in 1990 to develop the next generation (at that time) coupled GCM-based climate model on parallel supercomputers. Upon the successful completion of the Parallel Climate Model, the current CHAMMP program was integrated with the other projects in 1997 to form the current CCPP.
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