Support for the World Climate Research Programme

This award supports the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP). WCRP is taking the lead in ensuring that the global, regional, and national climate research communities create the enduring, rigorous and scientific foundation required to meet the urgent demand for robust and useful regional climate information. WCRP is pursuing – through international coordination – frontier scientific questions related to the coupled climate system that are too large and too complex to be tackled by a single nation, agency, institution, or scientific discipline.

In doing so, WCRP brings together scientists from the US and around the world, at all stages of their careers, to advance the understanding of the multi-scale dynamic interactions between components of the climate system and external forcing factors, as well as addressing and studying the role of humans on climate and society. WCRP informs the development of policies and operationally focused climate services, and promotes science capacity building and education in partnership with other programs.

Hubs for modeling and observations capabilities and for regional climate information for society will facilitate international coordination of the activities. The expected outcomes would include integrated capabilities for warning and prediction on global and regional scales at the multi-annual to decadal timescales; climate information meaningful at the local scale; approaches that take into account human and natural systems; and digital and dynamic computational models that represent past, current, and possible future conditions on the Earth.

WCRP also contributes significantly through its collaboration with national and international scientific partners to conducting sustained assessments, communication and education. WCRP activities contribute directly to the goals of the US Global Change Research Program.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.