2012 Articles

Climate Information for Improving Adaptation to Climate Variability and Change

Baethgen, Walter

The Intra-Americas Science Climate Processes Program (IASCLiP) seeks to improve and expand the observational network across the warm water pool region of the Americas as a means to improve the accuracy of operational models and regional forecasts. Early warning systems and long term climate monitoring will benefit from the proposed network for IASCLiP (e.g. subsurface buoy data and GPS precipitable water monitoring). IASCLiP seeks to link modeling research efforts to climate related societal applications across the 41 nation domain. The Prospectus, Monitoring and Modeling plans for IASCLIP can be accessed directly at http://www.eol.ucar.edu/
projects/iasclip/. Most coupled climate models do not reproduce the western hemisphere warm pool well with a noted cold bias in sea surface temperatures (SSTs). In recent decades declining subsurface temperature data, combined with a dwindling upper air network, have placed severe limitations on our ability to characterize and model the climate of the Intra-Americas Seas (IAS) region. Improvement of climate forecast modeling for the region is paramount to IASCLIP’s success and this can, in part, be achieved by leveraging the climate memory associated with stored oceanic heat content of the region. Starting in the summer of 2010 a team of IASCLiP members visited the IAS region to assess university and government interest in this new VAMOS initiative. Understanding and predicting severe weather events (hurricanes, droughts, floods and heat waves) were revealed to be key areas of interest for federal governments. Another key question was how operational forecast models could be improved, and what roles regional partnerships could play in this effort. Finally, short and long term changes in climate were noted as major areas of concern.