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CAS Spotlight: 3rd WCRP Observation and Assimilation Panel (WOAP) Meeting

The third WOAP meeting took place at NCAR on 29 September through 1 October 2008.

About WOAP-3. The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) has set up the WCRP Observations and Assimilation Panel (WOAP) as an overarching integrating panel to help coordinate observations, their reprocessing and reanalysis, and improvement and development into more efficient and economic observations without corrupting the climate record. WOAP consists of a panel of representatives from all of the other activities in WCRP (projects and working groups) and GCOS to deal with cross cutting issues related to global observations, their analysis and assimilation, and the resulting products, from a research perspective on behalf of WCRP and GCOS. The Panel is chaired by Dr. Kevin Trenberth of NCAR. [More...] [WOAP-3 Meeting] [WCRP]

Staff Spotlight:

Jadwiga Richter

Representing gravity waves in General Circulation Models. Gravity waves are wave-like motions in the atmosphere generated by sources such as orography, convection, and frontal systems. Gravity waves have horizontal scales between 10's and 100's of kilometers, periods as short as 10 minutes and as long as several hours. Gravity waves are not explicitly resolved in General Circulation Models (GCMs) and hence they need to be parameterized. [More...]

Publication News:

Accelerated Arctic land warming and permafrost degradation during rapid sea ice loss
Coupled climate models and recent observational evidence suggest that Arctic sea ice may undergo abrupt periods of loss during the next fifty years. Here, we evaluate how rapid sea ice loss affects terrestrial Arctic climate and ground thermal state in the Community Climate System Model. [article] [abstract]

Effects of black carbon aerosols on the Indian monsoon
A six-member ensemble of twentieth-century simulations with changes to only time-evolving global distributions of black carbon aerosols in a global coupled climate model is analyzed to study the effects of black carbon (BC) aerosols on the Indian monsoon. The BC aerosols act to increase lower-tropospheric heating over South Asia and reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching the surface during the dry season. [article] [abstract]