Dr. Amita Mehta, Joint Center for Earth Systems technology (JCET).
It is recognized that to assess regional climate variability and change impacts on a variety of socio-economic fields, including agriculture, water resources, energy, and health; there is a need for climate information at the levels of individual sites and localities. The current climate models, however, typically have spatial resolution ranging from 10,000 to 50,000 km2. The present project is designed to conduct dynamical downscaling of Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) multi-model output to high-resolution, location-specific climate information. This task is accomplished by using the University of Wisconsin Non-hydrostatic Modeling System (UWNMS) cloud-resolving model. The UWNMS model is nested within climate model outputs representing various phases of climate variability and change to obtained climate variables at 2 to 10 Km resolution. The downscaled information will be used by a number of collaborators in a variety of hydrological and agricultural applications.