2.2 Regional climate research using WRF and MPAS: Overview and future development

Bruyere, Cindy, National Center for Atmospheric Research

This talk will give an overview of the current regional climate and high-impact weather research projects being undertaken by the Regional Climate section in NCAR/MMM. This will include active past and present research been conducted with WRF as well as highlights of our planned transition to the Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS). Specifically, lessons learnt from over six years of regional modeling with WRF will be summarized using tropical cyclones as an illustrative example. Motivation and details of an ongoing ensemble regional modeling project will be described that aims to estimate uncertainty in future changes in high-impact weather combining different approaches to constructing future climate.

Initial results from a seasonal simulation of the 2005 hurricane season using MPAS will be compared to a similar simulation using WRF. Finally, this talk will also give a brief introduction of the work being done with the coupled atmosphere-ocean-wave model COAWST.