Tag: Hydrology and Land Surface Processes

When choosing their careers, climate scientists have an advantage over those in many other professions: their work can be translated globally. Climate scientists all have the basic underlying connections of world climate patterns and phenomena, allowing them to travel, learn multiple languages and work closely with scientists from other countries.

For Dr. Hugo Berbery, these opportunities allowed him to travel from Argentina to the United States, where he’s spent his last 23 years.

Raghu Murtugudde is already accomplished in the field of sustainable water management and agriculture, but this past year, he added a few more achievements to his record after he was selected as a 2011 Leopold Leadership Fellow and lead a student program in India that sought to teach the basics of sustainability while looking at life and climate in the country. Murtugudde explained part of the reason he was chosen for the fellowship in the first place had to do with the work that he has done …

Researchers: Omar V. Muller, Ernesto H. Berbery, Domingo Alcaraz-Segura

In this work we examine the advantages of using Ecosystem Functional Types as a replacement of conventional land cover types in WRF/Noah. EFTs are dened on a yearly basis, therefore, they can reproduce vegetation changes resulting from either land use or natural changes.

Presented: WCRP Open Science Conference: Climate Research in Service to Society, 24-28 October 2011, Denver, CO, USA

*Note: Hugo Berbery student Omar Muller, received an award for “Best Scientific

Researchers: Emily J. Becker, Ernesto Hugo Berbery, and R. Wayne Higgins

This study examines the characteristics of cold season (November – March) daily precipitation over the contiguous United States during active periods of the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO).

Presented: WCRP Open Science Conference, Denver, CO, USA, October 24-28, 2011.

The Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites, better known as CICS, is made up of two distinct branches of the organization, one in Maryland and one in North Carolina. The Maryland branch operates out of the University of Maryland while the North Carolina branch operates from NC State, however, both feature collaboration from other university systems as well as climate organizations. The main role of CICS is to assist NOAA in efforts to use satellites and current Earth systems to gain …

The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) Open Science Conference took place this year in Denver, Co. from October 24-28, creating an outpouring of positive reactions from the scores of scientists that attended the week-long event despite the wintery weather. The main objectives of the WCRP, to study how predictable certain aspects of climate are and how human activities affect the climate, fit nicely with the overarching theme of this year’s conference, which was “Climate Research in …

229 – Evaluation of mesoscale model (WRF) and LIS-WRF under for various thunderstorm cases across continents
Principal Investigator(s): A. Kumar

a) To evaluate NASA developed Land Information System (LIS) in WRF (LIS coupled WRF) and also evaluate LIS spin-ups soil condition. First we have to run LIS spin-up for 5 years and evaluate simulated soil moisture, soil temperature at different soil depth, latent heat flux and sensible heat flux for summer and winter season and compare with station flux site data for verification. In second step we ran LIS-WRF coupled system for three summer cases and three winter season cases and evaluate LIS-WRF coupled system and its operational capabilities.

b) Self-guided research on mesoscale model evaluation and analysis: This work mostly done in my free time (weekends) and carried out with two groups: University of Washington- Prof. Robert Houze and Purdue University- Prof. Dev Niyogi. With Houze group, we are evaluating current microphysics scheme used in WRF mesoscale model and evaluating for severe thunderstorms cases over South America and West Africa. With Niyogi group, cyclone simulation based study and understanding then impact of land-surface feedback also investigating how large forcing impacted cyclone track and intensity.

227 – Microphysical Processes of Atmospheric Convective Systems
Principal Investigator(s): C.-J. Shiu

Global precipitation intensity change is suggested to relate to the global warming according to observed evidences and model simulations. However, the physical processes accounted for the changes are still not resolved and the magnitudes of these change are poorly simulated. Cloud-Precipitation processes are usually parameterized in large-scale models especially for global climate and regional models. How the microphysical processes of atmospheric convective systems responses with the global warming is an important scientific issue. Exact representation of cloud microphysics in global climate model is a key point to study this scientific question. Therefore, we would use the Coupled fvGCM-GCE MMF (Multi-scale Modeling Framework) to study how precipitation intensity changes under warm and cool periods of sea surface or air temperatures.