Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The proposed research programme aims at furthering the understanding of the physical processes affecting regional climate, including the atmospheric dynamics and its natural variability, and the associated changes resulting from the anticipated global warming of anthropogenic origin. The research programme is articulated around two complementary lines of investigation: Detailed energetics analysis of storms in recent past and projected warmer world, and event-based very high resolution regional climate modelling.Along a first axis of research, innovative atmospheric energetic calculations will be performed on analyses of observations and high-resolution climate model historical simulations and future projections. Diagnostic energetic studies constitute complementary tools to climate modelling for probing the Earth's climate system and understanding the physical processes responsible for its maintenance, fluctuations and evolution under changing forcing. It is proposed to carry detailed atmospheric energetic budget over selected storm tracks, based on the novel approach of available enthalpy (AE) that, unlike the better-known available potential energy (APE) approach proposed by Lorenz, is applicable locally, and hence is suited for the study of individual storms. Confident in the robustness of the AE approach based on our recent work, we propose to carry detailed energetics of the life cycle of storms that have occurred in recent past and compare these with those that are projected for the future under anthropogenic warming. The second axis of research aims at designing an efficient simulation protocol to achieve regional climate projections of unprecedented high resolution, at an affordable computational cost on today's supercomputers. By carrying a cascade of telescoping grids in which the very high resolution is only activated for the events of the selected process under study, computing savings of one to two orders of magnitude will be achieved. The saving could then be reinvested in performing unprecedented detailed climate simulations on the current generation of supercomputers. These findings will pave the way for the next generation of Regional Climate Models with improved approaches for achieving very high-resolution climate simulations at an affordable computational cost.The results of this research programme will provide the scientific basis and technological framework for performing and interpreting high-resolution climate projections for the next decade. In turn these results will feed information-based decisions for the development of adaptation measures to reduce the vulnerability of Canadians to anticipated regional impacts of anthropogenic global climate changes.