As part of a collaborative effort to support climate modeling research, DOE BER's Regional and Global Climate Modeling Program provided funding to the National Science Foundation's Decadal and Regional Climate Prediction using Earth System Models (EaSM) program, an interdisciplinary grand challenge aimed at augmenting existing and developing next-generation Earth system models to address the enduring consequences of climate change. Recently, six scientific projects were awarded grants under the EaSM program:

Decadal Prediction and Stochastic Simulation of Hydroclimate over Monsoonal Asia
Principal Investigator: Andrew W. Robertson, Columbia University/ The International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI)

Improving Decadal Prediction of Arctic Climate Variability and Change using a Regional Arctic System Model (RASM)
Principal Investigator: Wieslaw Maslowski, Naval Postgraduate School

New Approaches for Understanding the Statistics of Daily Weather Extremes in a Changing Climate
Principal Investigator: Prashant D. Sardeshmukh, University of Colorado at Boulder

Predictability of the Carbon-climate System on Seasonal to Decadal Time Scales
Principal Investigator: Inez Fung, University of California, Berkeley

Quantifying the Uncertainties of Aerosol Indirect Effects and Impacts on Decadal-scale Climate Variability in NCAR CAM5 and CESM1
Principal Investigator: Athanasios Nenes, Georgia Institute of Technology

Simulating Aerosol Indirect Effects with Improved Aerosol-Cloud-Precipitation Representations in a Coupled Regional Climate Model
Principal Investigator: Yang Zhang, North Carolina State University

As part of NSF's EaSM program, research areas of interest support development of reliable regional and decadal climate models that address change intensity and account for influence of living systems, including ecosystems, agricultural working lands and forests, urban environments, biogeochemistry, atmospheric chemistry, ocean and atmospheric currents, water cycle, land ice, and human activities.

About Regional and Global Climate Modeling

The Regional and Global Climate Modeling (RGCM) program couples climate and Earth system models, focusing on regional and global climate change projections and temporal scales spanning decadal to centennial, to provide critical details about uncertainty and future variability of Earth's climate system. RGCM sponsors scientific projects that analyze multi-model climate change projections with the goal of quantifying uncertainties and feedbacks in Earth system processes, assessing climate sensitivity and variability, detecting and characterizing climate change (including examining regional contributions and model biases), and producing reliable projections. RGCM also contributes to the Climate Variability and Change element of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) and coordinates with climate modeling programs sourced at other federal agencies.