Regional Climate Simulations for North America

We are completing multi‐decade to multi‐century simulations of regional climate at on a 50 km grid over

North America and a 15 km grid over Western and Eastern North America. Our goals are 1) to

understand the nature of climate change and variability and how that is manifest in ecosystem and

hydrological responses, 2) to evaluate the ability of the regional model to simulate known past climate

changes and 3) to provide climate information in a form that is useful for land managers.

We are driving the regional model with lateral and surface (SST) boundary conditions derived from three

AOGCMs: GENMOM (1990‐2100), GFDL (1968‐1999 and 2038‐2069), Max Planck (1860‐2100) and the

NCEP Reanalysis (1968‐2010). The 50‐km runs are continuous over the indicated periods. The 15‐km

runs are multi‐decadal and spaced over the bounding periods. We are saving large sets (>70 fields and

variables) of simulated and derived surface and atmospheric fields for each simulation on a 3‐hr time

step. We will present an aspect of our analysis of potential climate‐related changes in surface

hydrology that are relevant to aquatic habitat in Western North America.