Previous NCAR Features

Antarctic Warming, Antarctic Cooling

(Posted: 19 May 2009)

Until recently, the Antarctic ice sheet looked to be bucking the global warming trend. This assessment relied on temperature data collected from a sparse network of mostly coastal weather stations. To provide a more complete picture of Antarctica’s historic surface temperature regime, a team of U.S. scientists employed an innovative technique to construct 50-year estimates of the near-surface temperature anomalies for the entire continent.

Small but Mighty: Virus-sized Pollutants Affect Mexico City Human Health and Climate

(Posted: 05 May 2009)

Air pollution causes significant human health and environmental problems; in megacities, with populations in excess of 10 million, these impacts are magnified.

Modeling the atmosphere at video game speed

(Posted: 23 April 2009)

Researchers in ESSL and CISL are looking at how new generations of super-fast Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) and multicore chips, such as the Cell Broadband Engine, can be used in atmospheric models.

Community Ice Sheet Model Will Aid Understanding of Sea Level Rise

(Posted: 06 April 2009)

If melted, all of the ice on the Earth’s surface could raise global sea level by more than 200 feet. Because most of this ice resides in the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, interest in understanding ice sheet dynamics is growing, particularly among scientists responsible for designing the Community Climate System Model (CCSM), a general circulation model built by the climate modeling community and housed at NCAR.

Urbanization and Rainfall in Beijing

(Posted: 30 March 2009)

Fei Chen (RAL and TIIMES) is collaborating with colleagues at China’s Institute of Urban Meteorology to explore how growth in Beijing is changing the city’s summer rainfall patterns.

Dr. Jenouvrier’s Penguins: Projecting Emperor Penguin Population in a Warming World

(Posted: 18 March 2009)

Polar bears, the poster children for Arctic climate change, are getting competition for the title of climate change casualty from the opposite side of the globe. Antarctica’s emperor penguins may face an equally dire fate.

Alerting Pilots to Turbulence: NCAR Scientists Design Prototype for Safer Navigation

(Posted: 26 February 2009)

Forget the stunning in-flight views of rugged mountains and nearby ocean. What proves more memorable to many pilots and passengers flying into Juneau’s International Airport is the turbulence felt during approach and departure. Pilots landing and departing from Juneau, Alaska face some of the nation’s most challenging navigational conditions, and the airport has a history of turbulence-related incidents involving passenger jets. In the aftermath of a 737 aircraft nearly being lost upon encountering severe turbulence, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) imposed restrictive rules of operation that were to be maintained until a new warning system could be developed for the airport.

Modeling turbulence far from storms

(Posted: 17 February 2009)

Several red-eye commercial flights were rocked by moderate to severe turbulence as they flew across northeast Kansas early on June 17, 2005. Thunderstorms cause at least 20% of aircraft encounters with turbulence at cruising altitudes.

Land-atmosphere Connection

(Posted: 29 January 2009)

In a forest outside Colorado Springs, a group of researchers is investigating how forests impact weather and air quality. The team even suspects that the pine beetles eating their way through the West’s forests are altering local weather patterns.

Forecasting for wind energy

(Posted: 06 January 2009)

Accurate, high-resolution weather forecasts are a critical part of wind energy production. In December, UCAR signed an agreement with Xcel Energy to develop a wind prediction system for the company’s wind energy farms in Colorado, Minnesota, and Texas. Experimental forecasts may start as early as May. RAL has been discussing the scientific and engineering challenges of wind forecasting with Xcel Energy since last March, according to Bill Mahoney (RAL).

Ozone and mortality

(Posted: 18 December 2008)

Ground-level ozone, an air pollutant that is monitored by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), damages human health by irritating the respiratory system, reducing lung function, damaging lung cells, and aggravating asthma and other chronic conditions. In March 2008, the EPA strengthened ozone standards by lowering acceptable limits from 84 parts per billion to 75 parts per billion.

Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF): Events at Fall AGU

(Posted: 08 December 2008)

The Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF), a community infrastructure project based in CISL, will be hosting several events at the Fall AGU Meeting in San Francisco, CA. On the morning of December 16, an AGU poster session entitled "The Science of Coupling with the ESMF" will be held at the Moscone Center South.

Supercomputing 08: NCAR to showcase high-end technologies that enable scientific discovery

(Posted: 13 November 2008)

A series of presentations by National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) scientists will describe current research results on topics such as global climate change, forecasting hurricane intensity and position, and astrophysical turbulence. The central theme will be how large-scale simulation efforts and emerging technologies and new tools are improving our ability to understand our planet. All presenters will be available for questions and answers.

Building resolving large-eddy simulations and comparison with wind tunnel experiments

(Posted: 07 November 2008)

We perform large-eddy simulations (LES) of the flow past a scale model of a complex building. Calculations are accomplished using two different methods to represent the edifice.

The Stratosphere-Troposphere Analyses of Regional Transport (START-08) campaign

(Posted: 01 October 2008)

The Stratosphere-Troposphere Analyses of Regional Transport (START-08) campaign to study the transport characteristics of the extratropical upper tropospheric and lower stratospheric (ExUTLS) was conducted April through June, 2008. The study incorporated data taken from instrumentation aboard the NSF-NCAR Gulfstream V, satellite imaging, and from various model simulations. START08 set the stage for more complex and comprehensive field studies of UTLS chemistry and microphysics currently in the planning stages.

TIGGE featured in EOS

(Posted: 03 September 2008)

The TIGGE project, short for The Observing System Research and Predictability Experiment (THORPEX) Interactive Grand Global Ensemble, is an international and collaborative effort to improve weather prediction and models. The project is currently featured in EOS, the weekly publication of the American Geophysical Union.

Stellar Insights: Using the TeraGrid to Understand the Stars

(Posted: 22 August 2008)

image thumbnail Our understanding of the Sun, and other stars like it, has been continually growing. But the last 20 years have been revolutionary. Improved technologies and observational capacity have led to entire new fields of study like helioseismology and asteroseismology that look at the global oscillations of the Sun and other stars to deduce their internal structure.

Travis Metcalfe, a scientist at NCAR's High Altitude Observatory and CISL, is using the TeraGrid to analyze new data about solar and stellar oscillations from satellites. He is also validating the results by comparing them with ground-based observations.

Beijing Summer Olympics and the Forecast Demonstration Project

(Posted: 08 August 2008)

The Institute of Urban Meteorology (IUM) of the Beijing Meteorological Bureau (BMB) and NCAR are working collaboratively to transfer the AutoNowCaster (ANC) system to the BMB, and to develop it further to adapt to the local terrain and climate.

Hurricane Bertha’s Worrisome Arrival

(Posted: 11 July 2008)

image thumbnail Chris Mooney, online pundit at The Daily Green, writes of his conversation with NCAR Senior Scientist Greg Holland concerning the early arrival of such an intense hurricane. Bertha formed just before Independence Day last week, exploding into a powerful Category 3 major hurricane Monday with 120 mile per hour winds.

ARCTAS: Measuring the Arctic’s Haze and Smoke

(Posted: 27 June 2008)

The Arctic is often perceived as a pristine place, located as it is far from the world’s smokestacks. And yet its atmosphere serves as a receptor for air pollution from the industrial regions of North America, Europe, and Asia. The reddish-brown soup of pollution that peaks in late winter and early spring even has a name—Arctic haze. During the summer, smoke from wildfires joins the mix. This spring and summer, NCAR researchers from ESSL/ACD and EOL are supporting a NASA field project to investigate the chemistry of the Arctic’s lower atmosphere.

Weather Research & Forecasting Model (WRF) version 3.0, released

(Posted: 09 June 2008)

On April 8, 2008, WRF 3.0 was released. The current WRF (Weather Research and Forecasting Model) software framework supports two dynamical solvers: the Advanced Research WRF (ARW, Users' page) developed and maintained by the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology Division of NCAR, and the nonhydrostatic Mesoscale Model (NMM, Users' page) developed by the National Centers for Environmental Prediction with user support provided by the Developmental Testbed Center.

A Synthesis and Assessment of the Effects of Climate Change on U.S. Ecosystems

(Posted: 27 May 2008)

Published May 27, 2008, the Synthesis and Assessment Product 4.3 (SAP 4.3): The Effects of Climate Change on Agriculture, Land Resources, Water Resources, and Biodiversity in the United States is the most extensive examination of the impacts of climate change on important U.S. ecosystems undertaken to date.

Looming question: The effect of climate change on crops, and of land use on climate

(Posted: 28 April 2008)

A looming question for society is the effect of climate change on crops and, in turn, the effects of agricultural land use and management on climate. To help researchers address such issues, Sam Levis, part of a team of researchers in the Terrestrial Science Section ( ESSL / CGD ), is coupling a crop model to the land component (CLM) of the NCAR-based Community Climate System Model.

VAPOR - Visualization and Analysis Platform

(Posted: 04 April 2008)

VAPOR is the Visualization and Analysis Platform for Ocean, Atmosphere, and Solar Researchers, and provides a visual data discovery environment tailored to the specialized needs of the geosciences CFD community.

Human-Environmental Interaction and Risk for Dengue Fever

(Posted: 31 March 2008)

Dengue fever is an emerging arboviral disease with worldwide impact. Increasing numbers of cases of this disease in both the Americas and Asia necessitate an examination of changing human and vector ecology, in order to better understand the dynamics of dengue transmission.

Turbulence in Hurricane Models

(Posted: 26 February 2008)

Scientists have discovered signs of turbulent eddies swirling through a simplified tropical cyclone. Such turbulence, which occurs on too small a scale to be directly depicted in global or regional weather models, was detected by ESSL/MMM’s Yongsheng Chen and Rich Rotunno in some of the finest-scale hurricane modeling ever conducted.

EOL’s Flight Tracking System

(Posted: 15 February 2008)

The EOL Flight tracking system, designed by EOL with Google and other technologies, allows the user to watch a live track of EOL's aircraft in flight.

Now available: Model Evaluation Tools (MET), version 1.0

(Posted: 04 February 2008)

NCAR feature image Now Available: Model Evaluation Tools (MET), version 1.0. MET is designed to be a highly-configurable, state-of-the-art suite of verification tools. It was developed using output from the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) modeling system may but be applied to the output of other modeling systems as well.

Newest CCSM3 Animation shows Four IPCC Scenarios

(Posted: 24 January 2008)

NCAR feature image NCAR's Climate & Global Dynamics Division (ESSL), has released an updated animation from the CCSM3 model, which models the warming effects of the four IPCC Fourth Assessment Report scenarios for CO2 levels, into the year 2100. Entitled, "Surface temperature change relative to 1879 - 1899 baseline", the model shows the temporary cooling effects during the 5 major volcanic eruptions of this time period, and then the model's estimates of warming under the different scenarios.

The Globalization of air quality and intercontinental transport

(Posted: 18 December 2007)

feature image The Task Force on Hemispheric Transport of Air Pollution (TF HTAP) was set up in 2004 by the United Nations Economy Commission for Europe (UNECE) Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP Convention). The TF HTAP was charged to obtain a better understanding of intercontinental transport of air pollution and to provide estimates of source-receptor (S/R) relationships for intercontinental air pollution.

Field Guide: The Effects of Climate Change on Coral Reefs

(Posted: 14 December 2007)

Because coral reefs are sensitive to environmental perturbations, reef degradation is increasingly common worldwide. Slight changes in incoming sunlight, water temperature, salinity, and acidity affect coral’s ability to thrive. Human impacts, both indirect (greenhouse gas emissions) and direct (sewage or sediment runoff flowing into the ocean, or blast fishing using dynamite) stress these ecosystems and may threaten the long-term survival of many coral species.

Featured in RAL’s 2007 Annual Report: The Developmental Testbed Center

(Posted: 07 December 2007)

The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) is a national facility created in 2003 to facilitate the interaction of the operational and research communities in accelerating the improvement of Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) for the U.S.

Weather Forecast Goes Global

(Posted: 19 November 2007)

Regional weather forecasting models focus on targeted areas, from a river basin to a continent, at resolutions high enough to depict individual storms and other fine-scale features. But weather doesn’t stop at the edge of a model’s domain, and the artificial boundaries between regions can create forecasting problems.

Global model goes local, zooming in on hurricanes and other fine-scale features

(Posted: 05 November 2007)

NCAR experimenters boosted resolution fourfold in two key components of the Community Climate System Model to produce the fine-scale details in this animation, which captures one month of a five-year simulation. The animation shows the global circulation pattern that transports water vapor from the tropics toward the poles, an atmospheric feature generally well simulated by climate models.

IPCC shares Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore

(Posted: 30 October 2007)

Click to view one of NCAR’s CCSM model animations for the IPCC. Congratulations to the United Nation’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore on their Nobel Peace Prize award. Since 1990, the IPCC has issued four major assessment reports documenting the growing scientific understanding of the climate change issue. Scientists at NCAR and within our wider research community contributed significantly to these reports, serving as authors and reviewers, and conducting the research on climate change and its impacts that provides the foundation for the IPCC’s work.

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