Global Climate Modeling and Climate Processes

The goal of this project is to study the future climate change of Singapore and surrounding regions. This will be achieved by selecting a number of simulations representing important statistical characteristics from a set of probabilistic climate projections made by using the IGSM. We will then explore utilizing the dynamic sea surface temperature (SST) fields predicted by the IGSM 3D ocean model in these selected runs to drive our 3d Atmospheric General Circulation Model, MTICAM, to provide an ensemble of global climate projections for several decades into the future. The ensemble climate projections resulting from this project that cover a global domain will be used as boundary conditions for the regional meteorological model (Prof. Eltahir) and regional oceanic model (Prof. Rizzoli), leading further to high-resolution projections over a regional domain covering Singapore. The research will quantify differences in critical features such as convection, precipitation, cloud coverage, and surface heat fluxes made by the global and regional models. This will enable improvements in the description of sub-grid scale processes within the global model and represents the first step towards the possibility of coupling the global and regional models and hence, accounting for the effects of both large- and local-scale anthropogenic forcings in climate.