Challenges in Modeling Regional Climate Change (Invited)

Precipitation, soil moisture, and runoff are vital to ecosystems and human activities. Predicting changes in the space-time characteristics of these water cycle processes has been a longstanding challenge in climate modeling. Different modeling approaches have been developed to allow high resolution to be achieved using available computing resources. Although high resolution is necessary to better resolve regional forcing and processes, improvements in simulating water cycle response are difficult to demonstrate and climate models have so far shown irreducible sensitivity to model resolution, dynamical framework, and physics parameterizations that confounds reliable predictions of regional climate change. Additionally, regional climate responds to both regional and global forcing but predicting changes in regional and global forcing such as related to land use/land cover and aerosol requires improved understanding and modeling of the dynamics of human-earth system interactions. Furthermore, regional response and regional forcing may be related through complex interactions that are dependent on the regional climate regimes, making decisions on regional mitigation and adaptation more challenging. Examples of the aforementioned challenges from on-going research and possible future directions will be discussed.