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Frontiers in Decadal Climate Variability: A Workshop

Completed

Topics

Understanding climate variability on the decadal timescale is important to decision-making. Planners and policy makers want information about decadal variability in order to make decisions in a range of sectors, including for infrastructure, water resources, agriculture, and energy. This workshop was convened to examine variability in Earth’s climate on decadal timescales. During the workshop, ocean and climate scientists reviewed the state of the science of decadal climate variability and its relationship to rates of human-caused global warming, and they explored opportunities for improvement in modeling and observations and assessing knowledge gaps.
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Description

An ad hoc NRC committee will plan a workshop to bring together atmospheric and ocean climate experts to review the current science for decadal climate variability. Workshop participants will be asked to:

  1. examine our understanding of the processes governing decadal-scale variability in key climate parameters, observational evidence of decadal variability and potential forcings, and model-based experiments to explore possible factors affecting decadal variations;
  2. discuss key science, observing, and modeling gaps;
  3. consider the utility and accuracy of various observations for tracking long-term climate variability, anticipating the onset and end of hiatus regimes, and closing the long-term heat budget;
  4. consider the utility of hiatus regimes as a metric for evaluating performance of long-term climate models; and
  5. consider how best to communicate current understanding of climate variability, including potential causes and consequences, to non-expert audiences.

A summary of the workshop will be prepared by a designated rapporteur in accordance with institutional guidelines.

Contributors

Sponsors

Department of Energy

NASA

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

National Science Foundation

Staff

Amanda Staudt

Lead

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