Highlights

Since 1989, the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) has submitted annual reports to Congress called Our Changing Planet. The reports describe the status of USGCRP research activities, provide progress updates, and document recent accomplishments.

In particular, Our Changing Planet highlights progress and accomplishments in interagency activities. These highlights represent the broad spectrum of USGCRP activities that extend from Earth system observations, modeling, and fundamental research through synthesis and assessment, decision support, education, and public engagement.

The U.S. research centers that develop climate and Earth system models and the U.S. scientific community are key participants in long-running collaborative efforts to improve knowledge on climate change. A number of major interagency activities supporting improvements in climate modeling took place in 2019.

Most prominently, the World Climate Research Programme Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) is currently in its sixth phase (CMIP6). The earlier phases of CMIP experiments have provided the research community...

Coordinated experiments run across major Earth system models help improve model projections and advance climate science understanding.

Projections of the future state of the Earth system can differ significantly across models, with various potential sources of uncertainty. To better understand the sources of difference and where fundamental scientific understanding can be improved, the Earth system modeling community uses a set of experiments run across many models known as the ...

The NASA GEOS5 model has made significant progress in simulating the MJO, demonstrated by how closely its output (right panel) visually resembles satellite observation data (left panel; in both panels, MJO events are represented as lines of green, red, a

Predicting climate conditions anywhere from two weeks to a season in advance is critical for making informed decisions and safeguarding infrastructure across various sectors of the U.S. economy, including water resources, energy supply, public safety, and agriculture, among many others.

USGCRP agencies are supporting improved climate forecasts on these relatively short timescales through field campaigns coupled with model development and analysis efforts. DOE, NASA, NOAA, NSF, and DOD’

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In March 2014, USGCRP helped support the launch of the Climate Data Initiative, a key component of the President’s Climate Action Plan. The Climate Data Initiative brings together open government data with commitments from the private and philanthropic sectors to develop data-driven tools that communities and businesses across America need to plan for the impacts of climate change.

With the launch of the Climate Data Initiative, data from USGCRP agencies—including NOAA, NASA, USGS, and DOD—and other Federal entities are

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Preparing equipment for the Global Precipitation Measurement mission. (Source: NASA)

Overview
A series of Earth observation missions planned by NASA and partners for FY 2014 will contribute fundamentally to advancing our understanding of global change. Such missions are foundational to USGCRP research and are made possible by a sustained Program emphasis in instrumentation development. The planned FY 2014 missions are described below.

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A comparison of observed (left) and simulated (right; single model realizations) hurricane tracks around North America between 1981 and 2008 (the horizontal and vertical axes show longitude and latitude, respectively). Tropical cyclones are challenging to

Overview
Climate and Earth system modeling supported by USGCRP agencies such as DOE, NASA, NOAA, NSF, and others was foundational to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) on the scientific basis for climate-change, released in 2013. Along with international partners, Federal and Federally supported modeling centers

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Highlights

Modeling efforts drive advances in projections of future climate change

Collaborative modeling experiments to improve understanding of the future of the Earth system

DYNAMO: Linking Observations and Models to Predict Near-Term Climate

Empowering the Nation with Climate Data

Supporting Global Change Research Through Satellite Missions: A Look Ahead

Modeling 20th and 21st Century Climate to Understand and Predict Change