Shukla Symposium on Predictability in the Midst of Chaos

A retrospective examination of the science of climate predictability and a discussion of prospects for future research directions

23-24 April 2015 Rockville, Maryland

Sponsored by the Institute of Global Environment and Society Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Shukla Symposium on Predictability in the Midst of Chaos

Program Thursday, 23 April 2015:

7:30 a.m. REGISTRATION AND BREAKFAST 8:30 a.m. Jim Kinter (COLA/Mason): Introductions and welcoming remarks Session 1: Predictability and Climate Dynamics (Chair: Mike Wallace) Sir Brian Hoskins (Imperial College): Week 1 Predictability in the Tropics from Equatorial 8:45 a.m. Waves? 9:05 a.m. Dennis Hartmann (U. Washington): Pacific Ocean SST and the Winter of 2014 Grant Branstator (NCAR): Long-Lasting Mid-latitude Responses to Short-Lived 9:25 a.m. Tropical Heating Events 9:45 a.m. Tim DelSole (COLA/Mason): Multi-year Predictability 10:05 a.m. Joe Tribbia (NCAR): How Predictable is the Onset of ENSO? 10:25 a.m. REFRESHMENTS Bin Wang (U. Hawaii): Decadal Predictability of the Land Monsoon Rainfall in the Northern 10:50 a.m. Hemisphere Session 2: Reanalysis, Climate Change and Climate Diagnostics (Chair: David Straus) 11:10 a.m. Eugenia Kalnay (U. Maryland): Shukla, My Life-Long Mentor Lennart Bengtsson (U. Reading): How Well Can We Predict Climate Change - What Have We 11:30 a.m. Learned from Several Decades of Progress in Numerical Weather Prediction? 11:50 a.m. Mike Wallace (U. Washington): Time Variations in Tropical Rainfall: Three Perspectives Kevin Trenberth (NCAR): Reanalyses Continue to Get Better and are Useful for Diagnosing 12:10 p.m. Feedbacks: a Case Study of Radiation vs. Temperatures 12:30 p.m. LUNCH 1:30 p.m. Louis Uccellini (National Weather Service): Evolving the NWS to Build a Weather-Ready Keynote Nation Session 3: Sub-seasonal to Seasonal Prediction (Chair: Ed Sarachik) 2:00 p.m. Session convenes 2:10 p.m. Kathy Pegion (COLA/Mason): Subseasonal Predictability and Prediction Bohua Huang (COLA/Mason): Multiple Analysis Initialization of Ocean on Seasonal 2:30 p.m. Prediction of ENSO and Asian Monsoon Cristiana Stan (COLA/Mason): Super-Parameterization as a Tool for Sub-Seasonal 2:50 p.m. Prediction 3:10 p.m. Ben Kirtman (U. Miami): NMME: Shukla's Vision for Seasonal Prediction (Slowly) Realized 3:30 p.m. REFRESHMENTS Session 4: Next Generation Models (Chair: Ed Schneider) Dame Julia Slingo (Met Office): From Global to Local, and From Weather and Climate to 4:00 p.m. Environmental Risks and Impacts Jim Hurrell (NCAR): Strategic Priorities for NCAR: Development of Multi-Scale Simulation 4:20 p.m. and Prediction Systems 4:40 p.m. V. Ramaswamy (GFDL): Anthropogenic Species and Climate: Diagnosing the Past and Modeling of the 21st Century Climate Change 5:00 p.m. Tim Palmer (U. Oxford): Greater Accuracy with Less Precision - A New Approach to Weather and Climate Prediction 5:20 p.m. David Randall (Colorado State U.): Cumulus Predictability 5:40 p.m. Adjourn 6:00 p.m. Icebreaker reception 7:00 p.m. Banquet

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Shukla Symposium on Predictability in the Midst of Chaos

Program Friday, 24 April 2015:

7:30 a.m. BREAKFAST PANEL DISCUSSION 8:30 a.m. Scientific and Institutional Challenges in Climate Research (Moderator: Kinter) PANELISTS (Cane, Fung, Goddard, Held, Philander, Slingo) 10:10 a.m. REFRESHMENTS Session 5: Asian Monsoon (Chair: Krishnamurthy) 10:40 a.m. Peter Webster (Georgia Tech): 70 Years of Monsoon Research and Shukla 11:00 a.m. Anjuli Bamzai (NSF): Our Evolving Understanding of the Snow-Monsoon Relationship 11:20 a.m. M. Rajeevan (IITM) (COLA/Mason): Indian Summer Monsoon Prediction: Problems and Prospects 11:40 p.m. Bhupen Goswami (IITM): Beyond ENSO: Exploring New Sources of Monsoon Predictability 12:00 noon Antonio Navarra (CMCC): Is Climate Change Finished? 12:00 p.m. LUNCH Session 6: Land-Biosphere-Atmosphere Interaction (Chair: Sellers) 1:30 p.m. Carlos Nobre (Ministry of Science, Technology & Innovation of ): The Future of the Amazon Forest 1:50 p.m. Paul Dirmeyer (COLA/Mason): Stranger in a Strange Land Model David Gutzler (U. New Mexico): The Search for Seasonal Prediction Skill for the North 2:10 p.m. American Monsoon 2:30 p.m. Inez Fung (UC Berkeley): Leaky Buckets 2:50 p.m. Robert Dickinson (U. Texas): Dynamic Mechanisms for Land to Suppress or Promote Precipitation 3:10 p.m. Closing remarks 3:30 p.m. ADJOURN

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Jagadish Shukla

Shukla, as he is known to all, was born in the village of Mirdha in the Ballia district of Uttar Pradesh, . This village had no electricity, no roads or transportation, and no primary school. Most of his primary education was received under a large banyan tree until his father established a primary school in the village. For middle school, he walked barefoot three miles each way. In high school, he studied Arts including Economics, Mathematics and Sanskrit. He was unable to study science in high school because it was not offered in any of the schools near his village. His father, the late Shri Chandra Shekhar Shukla, who was headmaster of a middle school in a nearby village, bought science textbooks for the sixth to 10th grades and asked Shukla to study them during the summer holidays and pass a test to gain admission to the science section of the next class. Shukla passed the test and switched from Arts to Science. After passing the 12th grade in science from the Satish Chandra College, Ballia, he left the village to study at (BHU) where, in 1962, he earned the B.Sc. in Physics, Mathematics, and Geology, and in 1964 received the M.Sc. in Geophysics. For the past forty years, Shukla has visited his native village every year where he has also established Gandhi College for the education of rural girls.

After working for one year on an oil-prospecting rig, he unexpectedly got a job at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM). Shukla worked at IITM as a junior scientific officer under the supervision of K. R. Saha for five years during which he received a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) from BHU (1971). At IITM he learned meteorology and computer programming and implemented a barotropic model for experimental prediction. Since the computer was in Bombay (a three-hour train ride from IITM), he devised a “remote computing system” in which an assistant would take the early morning train to Bombay with the punch-cards programmed by IITM scientists, submit the programs at the computer center, and bring the printed outputs from the previous day back to IITM by the evening train. This arrangement eliminated the need for IITM scientists to travel to Bombay to run their programs. While working at IITM, Shukla received a United Nations fellowship in 1967 to visit the National Meteorological Center (NMC; now called the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, NCEP) in Suitland, Maryland, the National Hurricane Research Lab in Miami, Florida, and the Japan Meteorological Agency in Tokyo. During his visit to Japan he worked with K. Gambo and T. Nitta.

Shukla met Jule Charney at the Numerical Weather Prediction conference in Tokyo in 1968 where Shukla presented the results of the research he had done in Japan. In 1971 Shukla resigned his “gazetted officer” position at IITM and went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a graduate student. His advisors at MIT were Profs. Charney, Norman Phillips, and Edward Lorenz. During one year when Prof. Charney was away on sabbatical, Shukla was a visiting student at GFDL in Princeton, New Jersey, and his advisor was Suki Manabe. He received a Doctor of Science (Sc.D.) in Meteorology from MIT in 1976. After one year at GFDL as a post-doc he worked as research faculty at MIT for two years on a joint research project with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). He worked for five years at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) under Milt Halem as the branch chief and with Eugenia Kalnay as the head of the weather group. In 1983, Shukla and his collaborators joined the University of Maryland at College Park. In 1993, with help from Antonio Moura, Shukla established the Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES) as an independent non-profit research institute, and the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies (COLA) with Jim Kinter as the Executive Director, and Ed Schneider and David Straus as senior scientists. Shukla is now University Professor at George Mason University (GMU) where he helped establish the Climate Dynamics Ph.D. program, and the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Earth Sciences (AOES).

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Jagadish Shukla (continued)

Shukla’s scientific contributions include studies of: the dynamics of monsoon depressions; the influences of snow, albedo, soil wetness, and surface roughness on climate variability; the influences of sea surface temperature in the Arabian Sea, equatorial Pacific Ocean, and north Pacific Ocean on seasonal variability; the intraseasonal and inter-annual variability of monsoons; the predictability and prediction of monsoons, tropical droughts, and El Niño and the Southern Oscillation; Amazon deforestation, and desertification and in Sahel; and the seamless prediction of natural and forced climate variability.

During the 1970s, the “butterfly effect” or “chaos” was the dominant theme of predictability research, and the community was skeptical about the prospects for dynamical seasonal prediction. Shukla’s research led to the notion of predictability in the midst of chaos, and the development of a scientific basis for the prediction of climate beyond the deterministic limit of the predictability of daily weather. Climate predictability derives from the influence of the slow variations of the atmosphere’s lower boundary conditions and their interactions with the atmosphere. With the development of coupled ocean-atmosphere models, dynamical seasonal prediction is now being carried out routinely by numerous weather and climate centers around the world.

Inspired by conversations with Profs. Charney and Yale Mintz, Shukla recognized the importance of land surface processes in climate variability and predictability and therefore established COLA with the idea that air-sea and air-land interactions are both important determinants of climate variability. Recognition of the importance of land surface processes in climate dynamics has led to numerous research programs, field experiments, and space-missions.

Another important contribution made by Shukla was his proposal in the early 1980s to NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF), to the TOGA program, and later to NMC (now NCEP) and the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) to carry out retrospective analysis of atmospheric observations. COLA scientists conducted the first pilot reanalysis as proof of concept at a time when the community was skeptical about the feasibility of reanalysis. Reanalysis of past data and climate diagnostic studies are now an important component of climate research.

Shukla has worked closely with scientists in India, Italy, Brazil, and South Korea. At the behest of the then Prime Minister , Shukla helped establish the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) in New Delhi, India. At the behest of the late Dr. , Shukla helped to form a weather and climate research group at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy, which provides training to many scientists from developing countries. Shukla and COLA scientists have also helped in the establishment of a new Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences in Allahabad University, India. He was a member of the inaugural committees for the establishment of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) at and the International Pacific Research Center (IPRC) at the University of Hawaii. In collaboration with the Director of ICTP, and the Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), Shukla helped establish the South Asian Climate Outlook Forum which enables South Asian countries to meet before each monsoon season to discuss their monsoon forecasts.

He has been a member or chairman of numerous national and international programs, including the Monsoon Experiment (MONEX), the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM), the Dynamical Extended-Range Forecasting (DERF) project, the Tropical Ocean, Global Atmosphere (TOGA) program,

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Jagadish Shukla (continued)

the Global Ocean-Atmosphere-Land Surface (GOALS) Program, the Climate Variability (CLIVAR) program, the ECMWF Re-Analysis (ERA) project, the Global Energy and Water Experiment (GEWEX) Continental-scale International Project (GCIP), the Atlantic Climate Change Program (ACCP), the Seasonal-to-Interannual Modeling and Analysis Project (SIMAP), the Austral-Asian Monsoon Working Group (AAMWG), the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) Joint Scientific Committee (JSC), the Coordinated Observation and Prediction of the Earth System (COPES) program, and the WCRP Modeling Panel (WMP). He was chairman of the 2008 World Modeling Summit for Climate Prediction, and he has been an advocate for creating multi-national climate modeling and prediction centers.

Shukla is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorology Society (AMS), and the India Meteorology Society (IMS), and an Associate Fellow of TWAS (the academy of sciences for the developing world). He has received the Rossby Medal of the AMS, the Walker Gold Medal of the IMS, the Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal of NASA, and the International Meteorological Organization (IMO) Prize of WMO. He was a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report in 2007, and he was appointed by the Governors of Virginia in 2008 and 2014 to their respective Climate Commissions.

Shukla has served as Ph. D. thesis adviser for students at MIT, the University of Maryland, and George Mason University. He has contributed to over 250 scientific papers and book chapters as author or co- author. The co-authors of his scientific papers include:

E. Albertazzi, O. Alvez, J. Anderson, R. Atlas, W. Baker, A. Bamzai, B. Bangaru, D. Baumhefner, L. Bengtsson, C. Brankovic, G. Brunet, M. Cane, J. Carton, Y. Chang, J. G. Charney, T. C. Chen, T. DelSole, D. DeWitt, Q. Ding, P. A. Dirmeyer, F. Doblas-Reyes, B. Doty, M. A. Estoque, M. Fennessy, L. Feudale, X. Fu, C.J. Garrett, B. Giese, R. Godbole, B. N. Goswami, D. Gutzler, K. J. Ha, R. Hagedorn, D. Hahn, M. Halem, K.Y. Heo, G. Herman, B. Hoskins, Y. T. Hou, B. Huang, E. K. Jin, F.-F. Jin, J. C. Jung, E. Kalnay, I.-S. Kang, J. L. Kinter III, B. Kirtman, V. Krishnamurthy, J.- S. Kug, A. Kumar, K.-M. Lau, J.Y. Lee, S.S. Lee, J. J. Luo, P. Malanotte-Rizzoli, J. Manganello, H. G. Marshall, J. Marotzke, L. Marx, M. Miller, Y. Mintz, B. N. Misra, K. C. Mo, D. A. Mooley, S. Motesharrei, D. A. Moura, C. Nobre, P. Nobre, X. Pan, T. N. Palmer, D. Paolino, C. K. Park, P. Pegion, S. G. Philander, N. A. Phillips, N. Pinardi, J. Ploshay, D. Randall, O. Reale, J. Rivas, A. F. Robinson, T. Rosati, K. R. Saha, P. P. Sajnani, F. Sanders, N. Sato, D. Schaffer, E. K. Schneider, F. Schott, M. Shapiro, S. Schubert, J. Schemm, P. Sellers, J. Slingo, C. Stan, B. Stern, D. Straus, Y. Sud, R. Suryanarayana, M. Suarez, M. Tippett, J. Tribbia, A. Vernekar, J. M. Wallace, B. Wang, P. Webster, M. L. Wu, Y. Xue, T. Yamagata, M. Yanai, Q. Yang, R. Yang, T. Yasunari, J. Zhou, J. Zhu, and Z. Zhu.

Jagadish Shukla has contributed to the science of meteorology and to governments, research organizations, and institutions of higher learning throughout the world, through scientific research, institution building, and international cooperation in meteorology for the betterment of humankind worldwide. He continues to serve the community through higher education, development of scientific programs, creation of new institutions, and fostering of further international cooperation in weather and climate research, to ensure that the fruits of scientific research are harvested for the benefit of society.

CENTER FOR OCEAN-LAND-ATMOSPHERE STUDIES

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The Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies (COLA) is a research center within the College of Science (COS) of George Mason University (Mason) that conducts research to improve understanding of climate variability, predictability and change. COLA is the largest single group of university-based climate dynamics and modeling experts in the U.S.

The core mission of COLA is to explore, establish and quantify the predictability and prediction of intra-seasonal to decadal variability in a probabilistic framework and in the context of global warming. Through experimentation with the U.S. national climate models, as well as collaborations with international partners, COLA scientists have helped establish a scientific basis for intraseasonal to interannual (ISI) predictability. COLA research is intended to both advance fundamental understanding of climate and to foster the transition of climate predictability research results to operational use in practical climate prediction. The research on predictability has implications for the attribution of particular climate events to external forcing vs. internal processes. This work has been documented in over 600 high-impact, peer-reviewed publications.

The COLA group includes several highly distinguished climate scientists whose expertise in climate modeling, climate dynamics and climate prediction is well known worldwide. For example, COLA scientists have contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports as lead authors, contributing authors and reviewers. COLA is also well-known for its long- standing development and support of the Grid Analysis and Display System (GrADS). COLA scientists have served as members of over 200 advisory and review panels, contributing to national leadership in climate science, national and international program integration, graduate education and post- doctoral mentoring, and outreach.

COLA scientists are working with others at Mason to reach beyond the basic climate research within their own discipline to create a campus-wide initiative on the sustainability of the Earth and applications of climate science to build resilience to climate change and to support decision-making in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

The research conducted by COLA is closely integrated with the Mason Ph.D. program in Climate Dynamics that is part of the Atmospheric, Oceanic and Earth Sciences (AOES) department. COLA scientists helped develop a large number of graduate and undergraduate courses at GMU. The Mason Climate Dynamics Ph.D. program includes 14 faculty members, 12 of whom affiliate themselves with COLA. Students working toward a Ph.D. in Climate Dynamics, currently numbering 25, have full access to COLA’s data, computing and intellectual resources. The program has graduated 27 Ph.D. students since 1998. Since 2008, COLA has offered a General Education Natural Science course on Global Climate Change and its impact on global society and ecosystems, which typically attracts over 60 students from 30 different majors, including Mason LIFE students.

COLA has been supported primarily by a jointly funded grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), at an annual rate of about $4 million for the past 21 years.

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CENTER FOR OCEAN-LAND-ATMOSPHERE STUDIES

PEOPLE: The COLA staff includes 12 faculty members in the Atmospheric, Oceanic and Earth Sciences (AOES) department of Mason, 11 scientific and technical staff members, 5 post-doctoral research associates, and 25 current Ph.D. students. Biosketches: ftp://cola.gmu.edu/pub/kinter/COLA_SAC/2014/

• Managing Director: J. Shukla (Ph.D. Benaras Hindu University; Sc.D. MIT; Fellow AGU, AMS) • Director: James Kinter (Ph.D. Princeton University; Fellow AMS)

1. Climate Dynamics (AOES) Faculty Affiliated with COLA • Natalie Burls, Assistant Prof., Ph.D., Univ. Cape Town • Timothy DelSole, Prof.; Ph.D., Harvard • Paul Dirmeyer, Prof.; Ph.D., Univ. of Maryland • Bohua Huang, Prof.; Ph.D., Univ. of Maryland • James Kinter, Prof.; Ph.D., Princeton • Barry Klinger, Prof.; Ph.D., MIT/WHOI • Kathy Pegion, Assistant Prof., Ph.D. George Mason Univ. • Edwin Schneider, Distinguished Prof.; Ph.D., Harvard • Paul Schopf, Prof. (Chairperson, AOES); Ph.D., Princeton • J. Shukla, Distinguished University Prof., Ph.D., Benaras Hindu Univ.; Sc.D., MIT • Cristiana Stan, Assistant Prof.; Ph.D., Colorado State Univ. • David Straus, Prof.; Ph.D., Cornell

2. Research Staff • Jennifer Adams, Research Associate; M.S. Univ. of Washington • Eric Altshuler, Research Associate; M.S. Univ. of Maryland • Martha Buckley, Research Asst. Prof., Ph.D., MIT • Ben Cash, Research Assoc. Prof.; Ph.D. Penn State • Brian Doty, COLA Research Associate; B.A. Northern Illinois Univ. • Michael Fennessy, Research Associate; M.S. Albany Univ. • Zhichang Guo, Research Assoc. Prof.; Ph.D. Ohio State Univ. • V. Krishnamurthy, Research Prof., Ph.D. MIT • Julia Manganello, Research Assoc. Prof.; Ph.D. George Mason Univ. • Lawrence Marx, Research Associate; S.M. MIT • Daniel Paolino, Research Associate; M.S. Univ. of Illinois

3. Post-Doctoral Research Associates • Rodrigo Bombardi, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow; Ph.D., UC Santa Barbara • Subhadeep Halder, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow; Ph.D., Univ. Pune (India) • Chul-Su Shin, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow; Ph.D., Florida State Univ. • Ravi Shukla, Research Asst. Prof.; Ph.D. Allahabad Univ. (India) • Laurie Trenary, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow; Ph.D., Univ. of Colorado

4. Information Systems and Administrative Staff • Thomas Wakefield, Senior System Analyst; B.S. Univ. of Maryland • Stacey Whitlock, Project Manager

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Mason Climate Dynamics Faculty. Front row (left to right): Natalie Burls, Kathleen Pegion, J. Shukla, Paul Schopf, Long Chiu, Cristiana Stan, Barry Klinger. Back row (left to right): David Straus, Paul Dirmeyer, Bohua Huang, Jim Kinter, Tim DelSole, Edwin Schneider, Brian Doty. Not shown: Zafer Boybeyi.

COLA Research Staff. Front row (left to right): Jim Kinter, Stacey Whitlock, J. Shukla, Vikas Chandhoke (former Dean of COS, visiting COLA), Larry Marx, Ravi Shukla, Laurie Trenary, Martha Buckley. Back row (left to right): Tom Wakefield, Julia Manganello, Ben Cash, Eric Altshuler, Dan Paolino, Mike Fennessy, V. Krishnamurthy, Rodrigo Bombardi, Subhadeep Halder, Chul-Su Shin. Not shown: Zhichang Guo.

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