26/02/2015 14:00 - au CEREA

Description

Earth System Modeling: Where Do We Stand?

Yang Zhang

North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC

Urban air pollution and global anthropogenic climate change have significant impacts on human, plant, animal, and the entire Earth system that encompasses air, water, land, ocean, and ecosystem. Despite a historic separation of the research communities for air quality, climate, and other components within the Earth system, their linkages and interplaysarereceiving increasing attentions by both research and regulatory communities. Earth system models provide essential tools that include coupled and interactive representations of atmosphere,hydrosphere, biosphere, terrestrial, and oceanthrough various processes and feedback mechanisms through energy, water, and carbon/nutrient cycles. This seminar will review current status for Earth system modeling and highlight its evolution and the latest model development and applications with a focus on atmospheric chemistry and climate feedbacks. Recent results on the development, improvement, and decadal application of the Community Earth System Model (CESM) and the Weather Research and Forecasting model with chemistry (WRF/Chem) will be presented to demonstrate the models’ capability in replicating the atmosphere and studying the impacts of climate change on the Earth system. Future research challenges and directions on Earth system modeling will be discussed.