NCPP Downscaling Workshop

August 12-16, 2013, NCAR Foothills Laboratory, Boulder, Colorado

Modeling regional hydrology (image courtesy of Dr. Andrew Wood, NOAA/NWS NWRFC)

 

Vision

We propose a workshop to support a community approach for objective, quantitative evaluation of techniques to downscale climate-model predictions and projections. The workshop will focus on real-world application problems drawn from several sectors, and will contribute to the informed use of downscaled data.

This workshop is a part of a larger effort by NCPP and partner organizations to develop a standardized evaluation framework for local and regional climate information.

 The workshop will seek active coordination with other efforts, such as the proposed National Academy Panel on downscaling methods and decision making, and the recently initiated European Union COST project VALUE (Validating and Integrating Downscaling Methods for Climate Change Research).

The targeted user of NCPP efforts for the workshop and in general is a practitioner with experience in the use of climate information in their region and applications focus; a scientist who is bridging climate science and climate impacts applications; a user who might be a city planner, from a public health department, from a water management institution, a risk assessment advisor, thinking about the impacts of weather and climate on their city, watershed or region.

The applications focus of this first workshop is on:

• water resources impacts
• ecological impacts
• human health impacts in urban areas
• agricutural impacts.

The goal of our Evaluation workshop this summer is to assist the targeted communities in planning. This includes determining what type of information is needed by practitioners, defining how to choose between different data sets that can be used to obtain the necessary information, or providing narratives on past and future impacts.

The main focus of the Workshop is on quantitative evaluation of the quality of localized information and the ability of that information to represent indices relevant to the specific sectors.

We will follow up the workshop with a series of activities in order to expand the reach to other interested people and orgainzations. If you are interested in updates related to NCPP, to the workshop and to our follow up activities, please use the email address in the "Contact us" tab above in order to request to be included in a mailing list of quarterly updates. Please indicate explicitly in your email whether you would like to receive such notifications. Unfortunately, due to budget constraints and space limitations this first Evaluation workshop will be by invitation only.