History of the Transferability Working Group

At the Ninth Annual Meeting of the GEWEX Hydrometeorology Panel (GHP) in September 2003 in Lüneberg Germany, interest emerged in conducting transferability experiments to advance the science of regional climate modeling and to take advantage of coordinated continental-scale observations and analyses. A Transferability Working Group (TWG) has been proposed within GHP to address the GEWEX objective of developing the ability to predict variations of global and regional hydrological processes and water resources along with their response to environmental change. TWG will address updated GEWEX science questions relating to feedbacks and natural variability, acceleration of the water cycle, seasonal to interannual predictability, and impacts on water resources.

The GHP TWG will contribute to the WCRP objective of developing fundamental scientific understanding of the physical climate system and climate processes needed to determine limitations of climate predictability and the extent of man's influence on climate. The proposed objective of the TWG, therefore, is "To understand physical processes underpinning the global water and energy cycles and their predictability through systematic intercomparisons of regional climate simulations on several continents and comparison of these simulated climates with coordinated continental-scale observations and analyses."

TWG will provide a means for systematic evaluation of simulations of different climatic regions by "meta-comparison" of individual and ensemble performance among domains as well as on particular domains. A goal is to evaluate transferability of regional climate models and their components from "native" to other "non-native" regions. Anchored by coordinated observations from continental scale experiments, modeling studies under TWG will examine influences of parameterization choices, resolution and nesting dependencies, boundary influences, and internal model variability on the quality of predictions. TWG will solicit interest among regional modeling groups for these experiments and will coordinate with other related regional climate model intercomparisons.

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