We investigate major results of the NARCCAP multiple regional climate model (RCM) experiments driven by multiple global climate models (GCMs) regarding climate change for seasonal temperature and precipitation over North America. We focus on two major questions: How do the RCM simulated climate changes differ from those of the parent GCMs and thus affect our perception of climate change over No...

To assess the status of global climate models (GCMs) in simulating upper-tropospheric ice water content (IWC), a new set of IWC measurements from the Earth Observing System’s Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) are used. Comparisons are made with ECMWF analyses and simulations from several GCMs, including two with multi-scale-modeling framework. For January 2005 monthly and daily mean values, the spat...

POLICY ACTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE IS INFORMED BY CLIMATE MODEL projections as described most recently in the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The models used are general circulation models (GCMs), which numerically represent the physical climate system in three dimensions, including the hydrological cycle. These are complemented by recently de...

Climate simulations performed with general circulation models (GCMs) are widely viewed as the principal scientific basis for developing policies to address potential future global change scenarios (e.g. global warming, ozone depletion, changes in land use, etc.). Hence, there is a compelling need to systematically improve the performance of GCMs in simulating the present climate, and thereby to...

We present the Representative Temperature and Precipitation (T&P) GCM Subsetting Approach developed within the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) to select a practical subset of global climate models (GCMs) for regional integrated assessment of climate impacts when resource limitations do not permit the full ensemble of GCMs to be evaluated given the need to also...

Ranking the performance of global climate models (GCMs) is a notoriously difficult exercise. Multi-model comparison studies nearly always show that each model has strengths and weaknesses relative to others, and for many purposes the multi-model ensemble mean delivers better estimates than any individual model. Nevertheless, in regions like East Africa, where there is little consensus between m...

Global Circulation Models (GCMs) contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) and are widely used in global change research. This paper assesses the performance of the AR4 GCMs in simulating precipitation and temperature in China from 1960 to 1999 by comparison with observed data, using system bias (B), root-mean-square error (RMSE), Pearson...

An efficient and novel technique is developed for detecting and localizing corners of planar curves. This paper discusses the gradient feature distribution of planar curves and constructs gradient correlation matrices (GCMs) over the region of support (ROS) of these planar curves. It is shown that the eigenstructure and determinant of the GCMs encode the geometric features of these curves, such...

We propose here that the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) plays an important role in setting the effective heat capacity of the World Ocean and thus impacts the pace of transient climate change. The depth and strength of AMOC are shown to be strongly correlated with the depth of heat storage across a suite of state-of-the-art general circulation models (GCMs). In those models ...