The Community Climate System Model Project from an Interagency Perspective

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will publish its Fourth Assessment Report of the Scientific Basis of Climate Change (AR4). A significant portion of the AR4 will be the analysis of coupled general circulation model (GCM) simulations of the climate of the past century as well as scenarios of future climates under prescribed emission scenarios. Modeling groups worldwide have contributed to AR4, including three from the U.S., the Community Climate System Model (CCSM) project, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Institute for Space Sciences, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL). This collection of model results is providing a wealth of new information that will be used to examine the state of climate science, the potential impacts from climate changes, and the policy consequences that they imply. Our focus here is on the CCSM project. Although it is centered at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the CCSM version 3 (CCSM3) was designed, developed, and applied in a uniquely distributed fashion with participation by many institutions. This model has produced some of the most scientifically complete and highest resolution simulations of climate change to date, thanks to the teamwork of many scientists and software engineers. Their contributions will become obvious as a steady stream of peer-reviewed publications appears in the scientific literature. Less obvious, however, is the largely hidden, unprecedented level of interagency cooperation and multi-institutional coordination that provided the direction and resources necessary to make the CCSM project successful. Contrary to the widely-held opinion that the US climate research effort in general, and the climate modeling effort in particular, is fragmented and disorganized (NRC 1998, 2001), the success of the CCSM project demonstrates that a uniquely US approach to model development can produce a world-class model

Reflections on Seminole Rock: The Past, Present, and Future of Deference to Agency Regulatory Interpretations

Seminole Rock (or Auer) deference has captured the attention of scholars, policymakers, and the judiciary. That is why Notice & Comment, the blog of the Yale Journal on Regulation and the American Bar Association’s Section of Administrative Law & Regulatory Practice, hosted an online symposium from September 12 to September 23, 2016 on the subject. This symposium contains over 20 contributions addressing different aspects of Seminole Rock deference. Topics include: History of Seminole Rock Empirical Examinations of Seminole Rock Understanding Seminole Rock Within Agencies Understanding Seminole Rock as Applied to Tax, Environmental Law, and Criminal Sentencing Why Seminole Rock Matters Should the Supreme Court Overrule Seminole Rock? Would Overruling Seminole Rock Have Unintended Consequences? What Might the Supreme Court Do? What Might Congress Do? The Future of Seminole Roc

A recipe for simulating the interannual variability of the Asian summer monsoon and its relation with ENSO

Author Posting. © The Authors, 2006. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Springer for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Climate Dynamics 28 (2007): 441-460, doi: 10.1007/s00382-006-0190-0.This study investigates how accurately the interannual variability over the Indian Ocean basin and the relationship between the Indian summer monsoon and the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) can be simulated by different modelling strategies. With a hierarchy of models, from an atmospherical general circulation model (AGCM) forced by observed SST, to a coupled model with the ocean component limited to the tropical Pacific and Indian Oceans, the role of heat fluxes and of interactive coupling is analyzed. Whenever sea surface temperature anomalies in the Indian basin are created by the coupled model, the inverse relationship between the ENSO index and the Indian summer monsoon rainfall is recovered, and it is preserved if the atmospherical model is forced by the SSTs created by the coupled model. If the ocean model domain is limited to the Indian Ocean, changes in the Walker circulation over the Pacific during El Nino years induce a decrease of rainfall over the Indian subcontinent. However the observed correlation between the ENSO and the Indian Ocean Zonal Mode (IOZM) is not properly modelled and the two indices are not significantly correlated, independently on season. Whenever the ocean domain extends to the Pacific, and ENSO can impact both the atmospheric circulation and the ocean subsurface in the equatorial Eastern Indian Ocean, modelled precipitation patterns associated both to ENSO and to the IOZM closely resemble the observations.The experiments described were performed as a contribution to the ENSEMBLES project funded by the European Commission’s 6th Framework Programme, contract number GOCE-CT-2003-505539

When Do Climate Services Achieve Societal Impact? Evaluations of Actionable Climate Adaptation Science

To cope with complex environmental impacts in a changing climate, researchers are increasingly being asked to produce science that can directly support policy and decision making. To achieve such societal impact, scientists are using climate services to engage directly with stakeholders to better understand their needs and inform knowledge production. However, the wide variety of climate-services outcomes—ranging from establishing collegial relationships with stakeholders to obtaining specific information for inclusion into a pre-existing decision process—do not directly connect to traditional methods of measuring scientific impact (e.g., publication citations, journal impact factor). In this paper, we describe how concepts from the discipline of evaluation can be used to examine the societal impacts of climate services. We also present a case study from climate impacts and adaptation research to test a scalable evaluation approach. Those who conduct research for the purposes of climate services and those who fund applied climate research would benefit from evaluation from the beginning of project development. Doing so will help ensure that the approach, data collection, and data analysis are appropriately conceived and executed

Active immunization of bonnet monkeys with procine zona pellucida antigen: influence of adjuvants on ovarian folliculogensis

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