The Vulnerability, Impacts, Adaptation, and Climate Services (VIACS) Advisory Board for CMIP6

Abstract

Abstract. The Vulnerability, Impacts, Adaptation, and Climate Services (VIACS) Advisory Board was created to provide a strong bridge between climate change applications experts and climate modelers for the Sixth Phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6). The climate change application community comprises researchers and other specialists who make use of climate information (alongside other socioeconomic and environmental information) to analyze vulnerability, impacts and adaptation of natural systems and society in relation to past, ongoing and projected future climate change. Much of this activity is directed toward the co-development of information needed by decision-makers for managing projected risks. The initialization of CMIP6 provided a unique opportunity to facilitate a two-way dialogue between CMIP6 climate modelers and VIACS experts who are looking to apply CMIP6 results for a wide array of research and climate services objectives. The VIACS Advisory Board convenes leaders of major impact sectors, international programs, and climate services in order to solicit community feedback that increases applications relevance of the CMIP6 Model Intercomparison Projects (MIPs). As an illustration of its potential, the VIACS community provided CMIP6 leadership with a list of prioritized climate model variables and MIP experiments thought to be of greatest importance to the climate model applications community. Climate modelers therefore received useful guidance as to the applicability and societal relevance of their simulation outputs. The VIACS Advisory Board also reflected on contributions to Obs4MIPs and user needs for the gridding and processing of model output. Furthermore, the wide application of climate model outputs by VIACS users provides an error check and ground-truthing of the climate model-based results.

Representing agriculture in Earth System Models: Approaches and priorities for development

“…In particular, for larger LULCC areas, there were statistically significant changes in albedo and partitioning between latent and sensible fluxes, which would contribute to the significant changes in surface air temperature found. For these reasons, the agricultural community requested that temperature and moisture variables from the agricultural fraction of grid boxes be included as output to capture the differential impact of climate change on agricultural lands [Ruane et al, 2016]. The authors also found that the LULCC became more important as a forcing under the RCP2.6 scenario [Brovkin et al, 2013], as the radiative forcing due to GHG emissions stabilize.…”

The Scenario Model Intercomparison Project (ScenarioMIP) for CMIP6

“…The observable variation in the seasonal cycle of the snow albedo is then a useful proxy for constraining the unobservable feedback strength to climate warming, as both are driven by the same physical mechanisms on different timescales. Other examples include constraints on climate-carbon feedbacks (Cox et al, 2013;Wenzel et al, 2014), the Austral jet stream position (Wenzel et al, 2016), cloud feedbacks and equilibrium climate sensitivity (Huber et al, 2011;Fasullo and Trenberth, 2012;Fasullo et al, 2015;Klein and Hall, 2015;Knutti et al, 2006;Sherwood et al, 2014), and relations of past and future sea ice or temperature trends (Boé et al, 2009;Knutti and Tomassini, 2008;Mahlstein and Knutti, 2012;Massonet et al, 2012). The ScenarioMIP design will allow for testing emergent constraint results under various forcing pathways.…”