A coupled regional climate-biosphere model for climate studies

This is the final report of a three-year, Laboratory-Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The objective of this project has been to develop and test a regional climate modeling system that couples a limited-area atmospheric code to a biosphere scheme that properly represents surface processes. The development phase has included investigations of the impact of variations in surface forcing parameters, meteorological input data resolution, and model grid resolution. The testing phase has included a multi-year simulation of the summer climate over the Southwest United States at higher resolution than previous studies. Averaged results from a nine summer month simulation demonstrate the capability of the regional climate model to produce a representative climatology of the Southwest. The results also show the importance of strong summertime thermal forcing of the surface in defining this climatology. These simulations allow us to observe the climate at much higher temporal and spatial resolutions than existing observational networks. The model also allows us to see the full three-dimensional state of the climate and thereby deduce the dominant physical processes at any particular time