Sara Pryor

Indiana University

Gene Takle, Rebecca Barthelmie

Near surface atmospheric flow regimes (wind speed and direction) have long been acknowledged as having particular importance for climate change impacts on society, but tools have not yet been fully developed or evaluated which can be used to derive highly spatially discriminated climatologies of near-surface wind speed and direction for current or future conditions. Hence, we propose to develop and apply physical (dynamical) and statistical (empirical) downscaling tools to the output GCMs to provide an assessment of the accuracy of various tools for downscaling flow regimes. We propose to:
(1) Evaluate GCM simulations with regard to flow and fundamental phenomena responsible for dictating near-surface flow regimes. (2) Develop, test and evaluate downscaling methods for flow regimes. Including quantitative comparison of empirical and dynamical downscaled flow regimes relative to long-term data sets (on- and off-shore), descriptors of the probability distributions of wind speed and quantification of error sources in downscaled flow regimes.