Program Co-ordinator: Daniel Caya

Mandate

• Produce projections of regional climate trends and their characteristics in a context of climate change, and assess the associated uncertainties.
• Improve knowledge of and the ability to produce regional climate projections, by developing adequate simulation tools.

Main objectives

• Provide partners with regional climate projections suited to their needs, using the best available tools.
• Assess the uncertainty associated with these climate projections.
• Offer expertise in climatology and in climate simulation and the support required for Ouranos scientists, including its partners.
• Maintain the group’s expertise at an international level of excellence.

Secondary objectives

• Produce a series of regional climate projections over North America, using various:
  • regional climate models (RCMs)
  • general circulation models (GCMs) to drive RCMs
  • future greenhouse gas concentration scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
• Develop and maintain co-operative links with major regional climate modelling institutions worldwide, so as to have access to advanced RCMs and selected GCM data to drive RCMs.
• Maintain Ouranos’ participation in international projects (e.g. NARCCAP/North America, ENSEMBLES/Europe, ICTS/global, GLOWA/Bavaria, etc.).
• Take part in university research as a co-investigator and in training high-level skilled staff.

Research projects

• Assessing the uncertainty associated with regional climate projections at Ouranos.
• Collaborative agreement between Ouranos and the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC) for climate simulation.
• Member of NARCCAP (North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program), with the goal of producing a bank of regional climate change projections over North America (multi-RCM and multi-GCM).
• Hydrology project
• Participation in the ENSEMBLES project (RT-3 subproject) with the goal of producing a series of regional climate projections over Europe.
• Participation in the ICTS project (Inter-Continental Transferability Study), studying the transferability of RCMs over different regions of the globe (Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, South America, North America).
• Implementation of ALADIN at Ouranos (in collaboration with Météo-France) and production of climate change simulations.
• Development of the new generation CRCM 4 / CLASS (Canadian Regional Climate Model / Canadian Land Surface Scheme).
• Implementation of ARPEGE-Climat at Ouranos (in collaboration with Météo-France) and production of climate change simulations.
• Climate sensitivity analysis simulated by the CRCM to different changes in configuration (de Elia et al. 2007).
• Participation in PIRCS (Project to Intercompare Regional Climate Simulations) to assess and compare different RCMs over North America.
• Development of Web pages and conversion/transfer of public CRCM data to Web CCmaC (monthly data).
• Development of CRCM 3.6 and 3.7 and their operational implementation.
• Implementation of the Great Lakes lake model in the CRCM.
• Development of the production environment and environmental diagnostics (automated) on servers and CRAY-SX supercomputers. This includes the implementation of a monitoring system for production simulations in real time over the intranet.