Recipient proposes to continue cooperative research with the NASA goddard institute for space studies (giss) to further elucidate the radiative forcings that determine climate, the dynamical…

This is a $7,479,828.14 Cooperative Agreement awarded by NASA to The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York to continue cooperative research with the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). The research aims to further elucidate the radiative forcings that determine climate, the dynamical response of the atmosphere to these forcings, and the moist convective and stratiform cloud processes in the GISS global climate model that control interactions of diabatic heating with the general circulation and cloud feedbacks that determine climate sensitivity. The agreement also includes a new NASA research thrust to generalize the global climate model for applications to assess the habitability of past climates of other solar system planets and the climates of observed and hypothetical rocky exoplanets. Additionally, it extends the research to include some of the ocean modeling work done at GISS. This Cooperative Agreement has an ultimate completion date of August 31, 2018 and does not utilize a set-aside.

Recipient proposes to continue cooperative research with the NASA goddard institute for space studies (giss) to further elucidate the radiative forcings that determine climate, the dynamical response of the atmosphere to these forcings, and the moist convective and stratiform cloud processes in the giss global climate model (GCM) that control interactions of diabatic heating with the general circulation and cloud feedbacks that determine the climate sensitivity. This renewal proposal differs from the previous proposal in three fundamental ways: (1) the cooperative agreement merges two separate cooperative agreements to unify research within the department of applied physics and applied mathematics (2) IT now includes a new NASA research thrust to generalize the GCM for applications to assess the habitability of past climates of other solar systemplanets and the climates of observed and hypothetical rocky exoplanets and (3) IT is extended to include some of the ocean modeling work that is done at giss. The clouddynamics-radiation research thrust will explore relationships among clouds, extra-tropical storms, and various modes of the large-scale general circulation; advanced approaches for parameterizing convection and clouds and their effect on climate feedbacks; and innovative uses of NASA satellite data to shed light on cloud processes and inform parameterization evaluation and development. The new planetary GCM research will study the factors influencing possible past habitable climate eras on earth and mars and the implications of the solar system's habitability history for detecting and characterizing habitable or inhabited exoplanets with future NASA direct imaging spacecraft missions.