Climate Downscaling for Regional Applications

• NASA funded grant: Sustainable Management of Coastal Forest Ecosystems under a Changing Climate in the Northern Gulf of Mexico
• Downscaling NASA GISS AOM model IPCC AR4 climate to 30-km and 10-km resolution using the WRF model
  
• Applications of nudging schemes (grid nudging and spectral nudging) in downscaling
• Assessment of downscaled climate using spectral analysis and root-mean-square-error (RMSE) methods

• Upcoming collaboration with Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (5Cs): Caribbean regional climate change and decision-making applications in environmental issues
• Downscaling IPCC AR5 model projections to 9-km and 3-km resolutions encompassing the Caribbean region and small islands.
• Develop applications in forestry, hydrology and ground water, extreme events including droughts and floods, sea-level rising, and coastal habitat.
  

Colaborators:

    Xingang Fan (PI), Western Kentucky University (WKU)
    Zhaofei Fan (Co-PI), Mississippi State University (MSU)
    Valentine Anantharaj, Oak Ridge National Lab

    Liang Chen (Visiting Scholar), WKU/Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Beijing, China
    Michael Crosby, MSU
    Sui Zheng, MSU

Prospective collaborators:

     CCCCC in Belize
     Cuban INSMET
     UWI
     Belize Weather Office

Global climate simulations and projections (e.g. IPCC AR4 and AR5) are downscaled to high resolutions for regional applications in forestry modeling, regional climate change impact studies including droughts and extreme events. Current work focuses on two regions, the United States and the Caribbean region.

US domains (Left)        Caribbean domains (Right)  

In addition to regional climate change analysis, forestry modeling based on projected climate shows tallow tree infestation probabilities over the south-east United States