Climate

Regional climate simulations of historic and projected climate at 30-km for the western U.S. and nested to 10-km California/Nevada. This work is part of the California Assessment through CEC funding in response and as a contribution to AB32. We are performing 10 year integrations for several sets of forcing conditions based on IPCC AR4 scenarios and output.

A second component is model-based simulation and analysis of land use change and sensitivity tests for bioenergy crop production. Here. we are developing a system for gridded global estimation of vegetation productivity.  One of the uses of this system will be to estimate present and future biofuel crop carbon assimilation.  It will also be used more generally for land use change analysis (e.g. from grassland to biofuel crops) in terms of carbon, nitrogen, and water cycles.  There are five main steps:  generate terrain grid, downscale climate data, create vegetation model input files, run vegetation model, process output.  This system is highly parallel in that each globe tile will be processed independently and in exactly the same way.  Thus, Parallel batch processing would be an efficient way to run simulations with high spatial resolution.  The high computational and storage demands of this project will provide ample testing of the cloud computing system.

Norman Miller, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab