National Aeronautics and Space Administration

National Climate Assessment

NASA National Climate Assessment (NCA) Activities

NASA Centers Call for Proposals

National Climate Assessment - 2011 NASA Centers Call For Proposals

Lead PI and Center: Drew Shindell, Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Title:  Analysis of Climate Drivers and Mitigations Options Within the Energy, Transportation and Agriculture Sectors Using GISS ModelE2
Proposal Type: Enabling Tools

Background:
Energy and transportation will contribute greatly to human-caused climate change over the coming century. These sectors, as well as agriculture, are important contributors to emissions of greenhouse gases, aerosol and ozone precursors, especially in the United States. Model projections for the 2013 NCA or IPCC AR5 will include these sectors, but will not isolate their impacts from other changes taking place simultaneously. Joint work between NASA and the EPA has developed infrastructure to allow output from GISS simulations to drive the WRF regional model.

Proposed Effort:
We therefore propose to use the GISS ModelE2 coupled climate and composition model to examine the role of these sectors in driving climate change and the impact of potential mitigation strategies for these sectors. We will assess impacts on climate, public health and agricultural productivity initially using the identical global model as used in the IPCC AR5. We will also utilize the WRF model to assess the most important drivers and mitigation strategies with the regional model at 36 x 36 km resolution and compare those with high-resolution simulations using the GISS cubed-sphere model. We will isolate the role of the three sectors in projected climate change over the next 40 years by keeping all emissions from the individual sector at 2010 values and comparing with the IPCC AR5 simulation.

Results/Significance:
We will assess the impact of mitigation strategies, using the sectoral emissions reductions obtainable with current technology as used in the recent UNEP/WMO Integrated Assessment of Black Carbon and Tropospheric Ozone. The global effects of those mitigation strategies were analyzed in the UNEP/WMO Assessment, but here we would isolate the effect of mitigation of US emissions. Additional mitigation strategies will examine changes in energy and transportation required to meet the Administration’s ‘clean energy’ goals. All data will be made available for additional impact analyses.