Connecting Observations to Global Circulation Modeling Challenges

The goal of the 2017 Radiation and Climate GRC/GRS will be to bring modelers and theorists together with observationalists to identify and tackle outstanding questions and significant uncertainties that are present in current global circulation models. The GRC is organized into eight sessions. Each session will start with one or two presentations from a global modeler and/or theorist, which outlines important uncertainties and unknowns in a particular research area (e.g., convective organization, mixed-phase cloud processes, global teleconnections and clouds, etc.). This will be followed by a presentation from an expert in observational technology, which highlights our current capability to provide the measurements needed to address the uncertainties outlined in the previous talk and extrapolates to how future technologies might be brought to bear on the problem. The talks, which will be tightly coupled, will spur discussion on the open scientific questions, the ability of the observations to answer them, and the analysis strategies that will more efficiently couple observations and modeling to advance our understanding of these important uncertainties.