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, George Mason University 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 Shukla Symposium on Predictability in the Midst of Chaos – 23-24 April 2015 :: 2 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 Brazil): 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 Shukla Symposium on Predictability in the Midst of Chaos – 23-24 April 2015 :: 3 Jagadish Shukla Shukla, as he is known to all, was born in the village of Mirdha in the Ballia district of Uttar Pradesh, India. 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 Banaras Hindu University (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). Shukla Symposium on Predictability in the Midst of Chaos – 23-24 April 2015 :: 4 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 reforestation 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.