Regional Climate: Design and Analysis of Computer Experiments?

• Activity Number: 144
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Monday, July 30, 2012 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics and the Environment
• Author(s): Douglas William Nychka*+
• Companies: National Center for Atmospheric Research
• Keywords: Climate ; Spatial statistics ; climate system model ; regional climate ; NARCCAP

Abstract

As attention shifts from broad global summaries of climate change to more specific regional impacts there is a need for data sciences to quantify the uncertainty in regional predictions. This talk will provide an overview on regional climate experiments with an emphasis on the statistical problems for interpreting these large and complex simulations. A regional climate model is a computer code based on physics that simulates the detailed flow of the atmosphere in a particular region from the large scale information of a global climate model. One intent is to compare simulations under current climate to future scenarios to infer the nature of climate change expected at a location. There exists a mature sub-discipline in engineering and statistics on the design and analysis of computer experiments (DACE). However, typically DACE methods have not addressed large mulitvariate and spatial fields that are the norm in climate model output. This talk will sketch how general methods from this area may apply to the interpretation of climate model experiments and to what extent the problems of interpreting climate projections are unique and require new ideas.