UW’s McCoy Receives DOE Grant to Study How Clouds Respond to Aerosols

How extratropical clouds respond to warming and how such clouds respond to human-generated aerosols are key science questions that need to be answered to provide higher-fidelity predictions of the future.

To better tackle these issues, Daniel McCoy, an assistant professor in the University of Wyoming Department of Atmospheric Science, is investigating whether basic cloud and precipitation physics link to how clouds respond to aerosols and to warming in the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM).

McCoy received a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) grant worth $663,751 over three years for his project titled "Linking Aerosol Forcing and Cloud Feedback to Atmospheric Moisture Processing." The grant starts Sept. 1 and ends Aug. 31, 2027. The overall grant project funding bumps up to $885,751 when the share from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, located in Richland, Wash., is included.

His is one of 13 Earth and Environmental Systems Modeling (EESM) projects that received $8 million in total funding from DOE in a July 31 announcement. The funding was provided through DOE's Office of Science. These awards support the development of the marine biogeochemical simulations in the E3SM; hierarchical modeling, simulations and analysis using Earth system models (ESMs) to enhance the understanding of biogeochemical processes (terrestrial and marine); aerosol and cloud interactions and feedback; novel methodologies and techniques for model initialization; and coupled data assimilation.

"Evaluation of ESMs, such as E3SM, with observations is important to our interpretation of their predictions of the future. We will contrast E3SM simulations with observations from U.S. DOE atmospheric radiation measurements," McCoy says. "We will leverage machine-learning techniques to link specific processes and observational diagnostics to climate projections in E3SM."

ESMs have been created by numerous national and international laboratories, including DOE, with the goal of offering actionable projections of Earth system variability and change.

McCoy is the principal investigator on the project and will collaborate with Andrew Kirby, an associate research scientist in the UW School of Computing. Additionally, the following researchers from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will be grant collaborators: Johannes Muelmenstaedt, a global atmospheric modeling Earth scientist; Israel Silber, an atmospheric research and measurements Earth scientist; and Susannah Burrows and Andrew Gettelman, both Earth system modeling Earth scientists.

"Fusing observations with ESM simulations allows evaluation of how causality flows from warming and human-generated aerosols to clouds and precipitation," McCoy says. "Based on this evaluation, we can understand how microphysical processes affect observed climate-scale variability and how this affects climate projection by ESMs."

McCoy adds this research will contribute to the broader goals of UW's Perturbed Physics Ensemble Regression Optimization Center for ESM Evaluation and Development (PROCEED). PROCEED is a DOE EPSCoR (Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) grant that supports researchers in UW's Department of Atmospheric Science and School of Computing, and at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. The infrastructure built at UW for PROCEED will directly enable the work funded by this DOE grant.

"We are excited to be given the opportunity to work on these questions at UW, and this will be synergistic with the U.S. Climate Variability and Predictability Program (CLIVAR)-funded workshop 'Micro2Macro: Origins of Climate Change Uncertainty' being held at UW in October," McCoy says.

The upcoming workshop has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and DOE to convene 120 scientists from the university and national laboratory communities to discuss research needs for understanding how microscale processes impact climate projections. A summary white paper from the workshop will be presented to federal program managers in Washington, D.C., McCoy says.