Record of Panel Discussion
Dr. Taroh Matsuno (Moderator):
The theme of the Symposium is the future direction of the Frontier Research System. In the symposium there were a number of presentations. Their subjects may be classified into two. One is a class of subjects regarding global warming and associated global environmental changes, discussed mostly on the first day. They discussed uncertainties of global warming prediction such as cloud-radiation feed back, soil moisture, typhoons and so on. The other important subject of presentations yesterday was about how to incorporate other aspects of change into prediction models, namely carbon cycle, atmospheric composition and ecosystem, in addition to the physical climate system change.
On the second day there were presentations mostly on natural climate variabilities. They discussed about ENSO, the Pacific decadal variation, Indian Ocean variability, monsoon variability and so on. Thus they focused on climate variabilities in the Asia-Pacific region.
These are phenomena or research subjects. There is one more important topic, that is, the Earth Simulator. How to utilize this most efficiently for solving problems is another important issue.
I Iike to call on program directors to talk about what is your concern, what are key issues and what is the research strategy to reach the solution.
Dr. Syukuro Manabe (Global Warming Research Program):
As I discussed yesterday, the largest uncertainty in estimating climate sensitivity is cloud feed-back process followed by albedo feed back involving snow cover and sea-ice. Yesterday I talked about how to estimate the feed back processes from seasonal variations of cloud radiative forcing, snow cover and sea ice. Use of the remote sensing from satellite is the most effective and important way to evaluate para-metarization of these processes which are very poorly understood.
Next important focus is projection of global warming especially by using high-resolution climate models. So far we have been collaborating with a group of the JMA-MRI at Tsukuba headed by Dr. Sugi. His main approach is first to develop a weather forecast model and then gradually change it into a climate model. By using a medium resolution atmosphere-ocean coupled model we can obtain the projection of SST change due to global warming. Then putting this SST in the high-resolution weather forecasting model we can study how inter-annual climate variabilities are affected by global warning, particularly the effects on weather systems like typhoons abnormal weathers and so on. All these are going to change with global warming. Effects of orography and land-sea contrast can be well evaluated by high-resolution models. This is the first focus.
