PROVIA helps to found advisory board: Better interaction with climate modelers

PROVIA Anchors New Advisory Board on Vulnerability, Impacts, Adaptation, and Climate Services for CMIP6

As part of the World Climate Research Programme, th Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) was developed to better understand past, present, and future climate changes arising from either natural, unforced variability or in response to changes in radiative forcing in a multi-model context. CMIP is now in its sixth phase (CMIP6). To help form a more coherent and productive interaction between the climate modelers in CMIP, the Vulnerability, Impacts, and Adaptation (VIA) community, and the Climate Services (CS) community, the Vulnerability, Impacts, Adaptation, and Climate Services (VIACS) Advisory Board for CMIP6 was created. The VIACS AB will contribute to the design of CMIP6-endorsed Model Intercomparison Projects (MIPs) and online analysis capabilities that will enhance the benefit of CMIP simulations. The Advisory Board will be anchored in PROVIA and include direct participation of representatives from numerous regions, impacts sectors, and prominent international groups such as the IPCC Task Group on Data and Scenario Support from Impacts and Climate Analysis (TGICA), the International Committee On New Integrated Climate change assessment Scenarios (ICONICS), the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP), and the World Climate Research Programme Working Group on Regional Climate (WGRC). The Co- Chairs of the Advisory Board are Alexander Ruane from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Claas Teichmann from the Climate Service Center.

The VIACS Advisory Board will facilitate efforts to address the key science questions of CMIP6. The VIA and CS communities have an acute interest in and high reliance on the best possible information about how the earth system (in particular the impacted elements crucial to societal sectors) will respond to forcing, how model biases potentially influence decision-making in impacted sectors, and how climate variability, predictability, and uncertainty may be handled in preparing climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies that benefit impacted sectors.

The first action of the VIACS Advisory Board was to task its members to solicit feedback from their respective communities as to the variables and experiments of highest priority for their planned applications of CMIP6 model output. The Advisory Board will provide input in particular on the development and application of the representative concentration pathways and shared socioeconomic pathways. Along with the historical period so called DECK (Diagnostic, Evaluation and Characterization of Klima) simulations, they are the basis for most state-of-the-art projections of climate changes utilized in assessments such as in the IPCC Working Group II.

Cynthia Rosenzweig
Member, PROVIA Interim Scientific Steering Committee
Senior Research Scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies

Originally posted here.