Faculty/Staff Daily Digest

Adventures in Climate Modeling: How Land and Air Interact at Different Spatial Scales, and Why it Matters

Dr. Scott Denning, Colorado State University

 

Event link: https://uconn-cmr.webex.com/uconn-cmr/onstage/g.php?MTID=ed6d39da901e8305f854cb25f3387a5dc


Earth’s vegetated land surface is a critical component of the climate system on its own terms and especially because everyone on Earth lives there. The land surface parses net incoming radiation into latent and sensible heat as well as storage, and mediates the flows of water, cabin, and nutrients among the atmosphere, rivers, and the oceans. Vegetation interacts with the atmosphere on scales from photons and molecules to the whole planet, but most of these interactions occur on scales that are orders of magnitude smaller than climate model grid cells. How are important but small-scale processes like photosynthesis, stomatal conductance, throughfall, soil hydrology, and runoff represented in global climate models?

We experimented with a new kind of climate model called the Multiscale Modeling Framework (MMF) to explore the sensitivity of large-scale climate to the representation of small-scale interactions. The MMF replaces the traditional concept of averaging across space to a form of statistical sampling with an ensemble of mechanistic small-scale models acting within every global grid cell. We found that some processes such as radiation, precipitation, through fall, and water storage were greatly improved in the MMF. On the other hand, we found pathological problems with large-scale atmospheric circulation and hydrology that result from upscale propagation of the fine-scale processes.



If you require an accommodation to participate in this event, please contact Rich Mrozinski at mrozinski@uconn.edu (preferred method of contact) or 860-486-3788.