COAPS Climate Change

Home

Publications

Climate Change

Climate Versus Weather - In general, climate is defined by the long-term (monthly or longer) pattern of weather conditions in a given region. Climate is not the same as weather, as weather deals with short-term variations tied to them movement and development of individual weather systems (fronts, cyclones, air masses). The earth's climate is now recognized as a dynamic system, with regional variations on many different time scales from seasonal, to year-to-year, up to decades and even longer.

The Center for Ocean-Atmospheric prediction Studies (COAPS) is presently working with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in building a new version of the Community Climate System model (CCSM) with the HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM) as the oceanic model. With the CCSM being one of the flagship model in the climate research community, it is of great interest to investigate how the CCSM performs with an oceanic model that uses hybrid vertical coordinates instead of the conventional depth vertical coordinate. Comparisons will be performed between the new CCSM/HYCOM and the standard (CCSM/POP) version. After the validation of the new coupled model, decadal to centennial time scale experiments will be conducted to study both and climate change (decades to centuries) and climate variability (seasonal to inter-annual). These experiments will include Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) integrations as well as investigation of the response and feedback of the ocean to external climate forcing.

Contact Jianjun Yin at or Tim LaRow at or Jim O'Brien at for more information.