Climate Modeling

This program aims to develop global process-resolving models to help quantify the roles of climate feedbacks in anthropogenic climate change. Abrupt and extreme climate changes from anthropogenic warming pose some of the greatest risks to society and the environment. Understanding of the complex interactions involved with feedbacks is critical.

Highlights

Project

MULTISCALE Methods for Accurate, Efficient, and Scale-Aware Earth System Models

MULTISCALE is a Scientific Discovery Through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) Earth System Modeling project, begun in July 2012 and running through July 2017, with the primary goal of producing better climate models to serve as the scientific tools and predictive tools that will address the needs of both the climate sciences and policy-oriented communities.

Program Overview

Questions to solve through improved modeling: How do the hydrological cycle, and water resources, interact with the climate system on local to global scales? How do biogeochemical cycles interact with global climate change? How do rapid changes in cryospheric systems interact with the climate system? How do short-term variations in natural and anthropogenic radiatively active atmospheric constituents interact with natural variability and contribute to regional and global environmental change?

Climate Modeling is one of three Programs within the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area’s Climate and Carbon Sciences Program Area. The key sponsors of this research are the DOE-BER Climate and Earth System Modeling Program and DOE’s Office of Advanced Scientific Computing.

Featured Projects

News & Events

Keenan’s Study Suggest Accumulation of CO2 in the Atmosphere has Plateaued

November 8, 2016

Trevor Keenan and others’ discovery suggest the rate at which CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere has plateaued in recent years because Earth’s vegetation is grabbing more carbon from the air than in previous decades.

Berkeley Lab addresses California Water Resilience challenges with new major initiative

May 23, 2016

The Water Resilience Initiative aims to improve hydroclimate predictions of water distribution, and to develop new approaches for water generation and storage that provide resilience in an energy constrained and uncertain water future.

Negron-Juarez et al. find that most ESMs show carbon uptake bias for tropical forests

October 27, 2015

Robinson Negrón-Juárez, Charles Koven, William Riley, Ryan Knox, and Jeff Chambers, researchers in EESA and CESD, published a letter in Environmental Research Letters showing that most earth system models (ESM) overpredict tropical forest biomass in response to increased forest productivity. In contrast, observations show that as tropical forest productivity increases, trees do not continue to store CO2 at…

Which processes most strongly govern terrestrial carbon cycle feedbacks in Earth system models?

October 12, 2015

ESMs (Earth system models) are crucial in estimating climate sensitivity, but show large uncertainty in carbon cycle feedbacks. A key step of reducing this uncertainty is to identify the processes that govern carbon-climate and carbon-concentration feedbacks driven by changes in terrestrial carbon stocks. Are these changing carbon stocks driven by changes to inputs, or changes…

New Research: Feedback between Permafrost Carbon and Climate

October 5, 2015

Charlie Koven, scientist in Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division, discusses newly published research results in LBNL’s News Center today. As global warming causes soil temperatures to increase, some of the billions of tons of carbon frozen in Arctic permafrost will will be released into the atmosphere, and accelerate climate change. This is a big unknown. Now there’s a…

O’Brien Fog Paper Featured in EOS

December 16, 2014

A paper that ESD Climate Scientist Travis O’Brien co-authored is featured on this week’s cover of the weekly AGU journal Eos, Transactions of the AGU—just in time for the AGU Meeting!

Earth Systems and Society