NOAA

Climate Test Bed

Modeling Two-way Land/Atmosphere/Ocean Interactions

September 3, 2015  Prof. Yongkang Xue of Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, CA gave a CTB seminar on Modeling Two-way Land/Atmosphere/Ocean Interactions at the NOAA Center for Weather Climate Prediction, College Park, MD. To study the effects of land surface processes, through atmosphere, on seasonal cycles and on interannual variability of SSTs in the tropical Pacific, especially on ENSO frequency and amplitude; the speaker has been developing a fully two-way coupled ocean/land/ atmosphere Earth System Model , which is able to produce main features of the global distributions of dominant vegetation types, the vegetation fraction, and leaf area index (LAI), including its seasonal, interannual, and decadal variability. Lively discussion follows on the sensitiveness to the land process of the results.  

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NMME Monthly Teleconference

September 10, 2015   This month NMME telecon first gave an update on the status of NMME Phase-II data, followed by science presentations of studies on the impact of land and atmospheric initializations, which revealed that contributions of atmospheric and land initial conditions to the seasonal prediction skill of two meter temperature and precipitation were mainly for the first month. The last telecon item was a joint introduction of nine newly funded FY15 MAPP projects focusing on NMME analyses/applications by project PIs.

Climate Model Development Task Force (CMDTF) Teleconference

September 22, 2015   A presentation entitled “Modeling Land Dynamics in the GFDL ESM Framework” given by Elena Shevliakova of GFDL Land Working Group introduced GFDL land model development approach, GFDL LM3 in the GFDL family of climate models and ESMs, and ongoing improvements in land capabilities for the next generation land model. The improved decadal and long-term simulation aroused a lot of interests among audience. The feedbacks from the operation community were mainly on needs of forecast improvement in the monthly to seasonal time-scale for not only temperature but also precipitation.

The CMDTF is an initiative of CPO/MAPP Program in partnership with CTB.

Important Date 

The NOAA CTB Science Meeting is scheduled on  Nov. 9-10, 2015 in NCWCP Conference Center, College Park, MD.   The two-day meeting is to review the CTB current activities, to address ongoing R2O/O2R issues, and to discuss the future (3-5 years) R2O research direction based on NWS operational requirements, science advances and opportunities. The meeting outcome will help update the CTB Science Plan and Implementation Strategy.   Detailed agenda and logistics will be posted on the meeting website soon.