Research

Regional Climate

Current Research

CIG’s research on Pacific Northwest (PNW) climate focuses on defining the characteristics of and driving mechanisms for historic, 20th century, and 21st century climate in the PNW. This research provides a foundation for assessing the impacts of climate variability and change on the PNW, and developing climate-based forecasts and decision-support tools for regional decision-makers.

Characterizing 20th Century PNW Climate Trends and Variations

• Developing high quality long-term precipitation and temperature data sets for the PNW. The statistical methods developed in this project will be used to remove temporal inhomogeneities in historic co-operative weather station records. The corrected datasets will then be used to extend retrospective Columbia River basin hydrologic simulations back to 1916.
• Determining trends in 20th century PNW snowpack. This research will provide resource managers a clearer picture of trends in PNW snowpack and the principal causes for the decline.

Projecting PNW Climate Change

• Evaluating climate model simulations for the PNW. This research will enable researchers to better assess the reliability of climate modeling results for regional scale PNW climate change studies.
• Developing a database of regional climate change scenarios. These scenarios will be directly applicable to studies where high spatial resolution, multiple scenarios, and a long time span are desired.
• Implementing a high-resolution mesoscale weather model (MM5) for regional climate change studies. The scenarios generated will help researchers better define the interaction between changes in large-scale climate and the local weather. The results will then be used to simulate the effects of climate change on air quality.

Additional research on climate and climate prediction is being conducted by our sister organization, the Climate Dynamics Group.

Related Work

• Nick Bond (UW/JISAO & NOAA/PMEL) and Gabe Vecchi (NOAA/PMEL) are examining the relationships between the tropical Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) and precipitation and flooding in the Pacific Northwest.
• Extreme Events in the Pacific Northwest: A collaborative study between CIG’s sister group, the Climate Dynamics Group, and Environment Canada is documenting the statistics of extreme daily temperature, precipitation, and wind events in the Alaska, western Canada, and the Pacific Northwest and how these statistics relate to dominant patterns of atmospheric and atmosphere/ocean variability.