Great Lakes Climate Ensemble

The U.S. Great Lakes are known for their impact on local and regional weather and climate.  However, the processes responsible for producing lake-effects and lake-induced modifications of weather are often poorly represented or missing from climate models.  As a result, many of the widely used sets of climate model projections (i.e., CMIP) and derivatives of them (i.e., statistically downscaled projections) are not only missing valuable information that decision makers require when planning for the future, but in some instances they represent a completely different system unlike the Great Lakes region.  In order to address this gap between end user needs and available model-based data and information, the Great Lakes Integrated Sciences + Assessments (GLISA) program is bringing together a team of regional climate modeling experts and extension specialists to develop a Great Lakes Ensemble. The goal of the Ensemble project is to develop an evaluation framework, which will be applied to several climate model data sets—including regional modeling efforts—to provide a regional perspective on the quality of information coming from the models.

This project builds on the work of: CMIP Climate Information for the Great Lakes and Representation of the Great Lakes in CMIP3 Climate Models.  Further description of this project can be found here.

Model Evaluation

We are starting to inventory information about specific climate models that will be used in our evaluation.   

View Model Inventory | View Model Lakes Intercomparison