I have specific modeling experience with general circulation models (GCMs) and regional climate models (RCMs). Most of my research with these models has focused on paleoclimate simulations and data-model comparisons, especially during the Holocene and Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). I used the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Community Climate Model Version 1 (CCM1) to explore the sensitivity of the climate system to different forcing mechanisms, such as ice sheets, orbital insolation, and atmospheric CO2 increases (Felzer et al., 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999) and the GENESIS model to study the hydrology of the paleoArctic environment (Felzer et al., 2000; Felzer, 2001). During my postdoctoral research at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), I enhanced an existing RCM (the Arctic Regional Climate System Model, ARCSyM) to model the hydrological system of the North Atlantic basin (Felzer and Thompson, 2001). The RCM was nested within the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) reanalysis to provide the meteorological drivers at the boundaries of a region with steep topographic and coastal gradients to evaluate the precipitation and storm tracks. I also have some experience with developing one of the early heat flux correction models for the NCAR CSM, because many paleoclimate simulations at the time were run without fully dynamic ocean models.
In my role as a Climate Scenarios Coordinator for the U.S. National Assessment, I was responsible for interacting with scientists and stakeholders from regions across the United States to explain the simulations and proper use of climate model scenarios (NAST, 2000; MacCracken et al., 2003). My work focused on understanding the climate processes responsible for regional anomalies within global warming scenarios (Felzer and Heard, 1999). These scenarios were used by stakeholders and scientists to develop coping strategies for dealing with the consequences of climate change.
Below are results from Lee et al. (2013) in which we used the latest NCAR model, CESM, on my own Beowulf cluster, Lehigh’s Corona cluster, and NSF’s Yellowstone cluster. These experiments involve changes to the CLM-CN land model to explore the role of carbon dynamics in the coupled land-atmosphere system.
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