About the Presentation: The talk provides an overview of various lake-atmosphere coupling approaches that are either currently employed or envisioned for NOAA’s suite of weather prediction models across a range of temporal and spatial scales. Special attention is paid to the representation of the Laurentian Great Lakes in the high-resolution, convection-allowing NOAA forecast models HRRR as well as the newly-developed Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS). The latter is based on a configuration of NOAA’s Unified Forecast System (UFS). The lake surface conditions for temperature and ice are either represented via NOAA’s operational 3D FVCOM lake modeling framework with the embedded lake ice component CICE or represented via a simpler 1D modeling approach based on the CLM lake parameterization. The talk will compare these two lake modeling approaches, will survey the pros and cons of online and offline lake-atmosphere coupling ideas, and will shed light on the temporal coupling frequency. The ideas will be illustrated via selected case studies that focus on lake-effect snow events during the winter months. These lake-effect snow events downwind of the Great Lakes are especially sensitive to lake-atmosphere interactions and thereby serve as suitable exemplars.

About the speaker: Christiane Jablonowski is an Associate Professor in the Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering at the University of Michigan, and the head of the Atmospheric Dynamics Modeling Group. Her research lies at the interface between atmospheric fluid dynamics, applied mathematics and scientific computing. In particular, her work focuses on the fluid dynamics component (the “dynamical core”) of weather and climate models. She advances the frontiers of multi-scale Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) and variable-resolution modeling techniques that can selectively zoom into areas of interest. In addition, Dr. Jablonowski is the lead founder of the Dynamical Core Model Intercomparison Project (DCMIP).

Dr. Jablonowski is the recipient of a Department of Energy Early Career Award and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. She is the co-chair of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) ‘Atmospheric Model Working Group’ and a scientific advisory board member for the ‘Climate Change Science Institute’ (CCSI) at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Prior to joining the faculty she was a postdoctoral researcher at NCAR and NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL)