About the Program

The North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP) is an international program to produce high resolution climate change scenarios and investigate uncertainties in regional scale projections of future climate.

NARCCAP modelers will run a set of regional climate models (RCMs) nested in and driven by a set of atmosphere-ocean general circulation models (AOGCMs) over a domain covering the conterminous United States and most of Canada.

The GCMs will be forced with the A2 SRES scenario for a current scenario (1/1/1968 - 12/31/2000) and a future scenario (1/1/2038 - 12/31/2070). The RCMs will also be driven with present-day NCEP Reanalysis II data (1/1/1979 - 12/31/2003). Planned RCM/GCM combinations.

NARCCAP also includes two timeslice experiments running AM2.1 and CAM3 at 50 km resolution. In a timeslice experiment, the atmospheric component of an AOGCM is run using observed SST and sea ice boundaries for the historical run, and those same observations combined with perturbations from the future AOGCM for the scenario run. Omitting the coupled ocean model saves considerable computation and allows the atmospheric model to be run at higher resolution.

About Users

We envision three main types of NARCCAP users:

1. Those who want to perform analyses on the NARCCAP output (e.g., for a particular subdomain).
2. Those who want to use the results as climate scenarios for performing impacts studies (e.g. on agriculture, water resources).
3. Those who want to use the results for performing further downscaling experiments, either via higher resolution RCM simulations or statistical downscaling.

More Information

• Abstract
• Events
• Goals
• Participants
• Program Plan
• Presentations
• RCM Characteristics

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