The CWRF is developed as a Climate extension of the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF) by incorporating numerous improvements in representation of physical processes and integration of external (top, surface, lateral) forcings that are crucial to climate scales, including interactions between land-atmosphere-ocean, convection-microphysics and cloud-aerosol-radiation, and system consistency throughout all process modules. As a result, the CWRF had demonstrated great capability and excellent performance in simulating the regional climate over the U.S. This presentation will focus the CWRF added values over the driving general circulation model outputs and possible impacts of the present-day model fidelity of future climate projection. It will also discuss the utility of CWRF for predicting climate anomalies and extremes, as well as regional impacts.

Dr. Liang received his Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing. He is a professor in the Department of Atmospheric & Oceanic Science at the University of Maryland, as well as a faculty member of the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center there. Dr. Liang's expertise is in the areas of climate dynamics, with the focus on numerical modeling and physical understanding of land-ocean-atmosphere and convection-cloud-radiation interactions, seasonal climate predictions, future climate change projections and environmental consequences (terrestrial hydrology, ecosystem dynamics, air quality, water quality).

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