Decadal and Regional Climate Prediction using Earth System Models

The consequences of climate variability and change are becoming more immediate and profound than previously anticipated. Important impacts, such as the onset of prolonged droughts on several continents, increasing stresses on natural and managed ecosystems, loss of agricultural and forest productivity, altered biological feedbacks, degraded ocean and permafrost habitats, global sea level rise and the rapid retreat of ice sheets and glaciers, loss of Arctic sea ice, and changes in ocean currents, have highlighted that climate variability and change can have significant effects on decadal and shorter time scales, with significant consequences for plant, animal, human, and physical systems.This activity enables interagency cooperation on one of the most pressing problems of the millennium--climate change--how it is likely to affect our world, and how we can proactively plan for its consequences. It allows the partner agencies--National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)--to combine resources to identify and fund the most meritorious and highest-impact projects that support their respective missions, while eliminating duplication of effort and fostering collaboration between agencies and the investigators they support.This interdisciplinary grand challenge calls for the development of next-generation Earth System Models that include coupled and interactive representations of ecosystems, agricultural working lands and forests, urban environments, biogeochemistry, atmospheric chemistry, ocean and atmospheric currents, the water cycle, land ice, and human activities. The realization of these goals demands the engagement of diverse interdisciplinary teams of experimental, theoretical, modeling and computational researchers, including but not limited to, biologists, chemists, computer scientists, geoscientists, material scientists, mathematicians, physicists, cyberinfrastucture specialists, and social scientists. Successful proposals will develop intellectual excitement in the participating disciplinary communities. Also encouraged are proposals that promoted diversity and have broad educational or societal impacts that capitalize on this interdisciplinary opportunity.Competitive projects should address key problems critical to linking relevant Earth system processes over a variety of spatial and temporal scales and to advancing the theoretical foundations for the modeling and simulation of existing data and data collected by the new and envisioned NSF environmental observatories. Proposals are encouraged that have the potential to dramatically improve our predictive capabilities as well as our understanding of how small and large scale processes lead to non-linearities and activation thresholds.The specific goals of this solicitation are to improve upon and extend current modeling capabilities in order to: 1. Achieve comprehensive, reliable global and regional predictions of decadal climate variability and change through advanced understanding of the coupled interactive physical, chemical, biological and human processes that drive the climate system.2. Quantify the impacts of climate variability and change on ecological, agricultural and other human systems, and identify and quantify feedback loops through which human systmes help determine environmental outcomes.3. Maximize the utility of available observational and model data for impact and vulnerability/resilience assessments through up/downscaling activities. 4. Effectively translate model results and associated uncertainties into the scientific basis for well-informed human adaptation to and management decisions for climate change.Two types of proposals--incubator/capacity building activities (Type 1) and large collaborative interdisciplinary research projects (Type 2)--are solicited. Please refer to Section II, Program Description, for additional information about the two categories of proposals.