Advancing wind-waves climate science - The COWCLIP project

Abstract

The Coordinated Ocean Wave Climate Projections (COWCLIP) project has been established with the support of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and the Joint Technical Commission on Oceanography and Marine Meteorology (JCOMM) of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC). COWCLIP provides a community derived experimental protocol for studying the role of wind-waves in the coupled climate system. A key recommended objective of COWCLIP is coordination of global wave projections for intercomparison between international research groups, to understand uncertainty within the community ensemble of wave climate projections. These objectives aim to support the climate impacts community, to support coastal impact assessments of climate change which extend beyond the effects of sea-level rise. COWCLIP aims for waves to become a standard component of coupled climate modelling systems, advocating development of coupled atmosphere-wave-ocean GCMs. Not only allowing additional parameters by which to assess the climate system, coupling waves into ocean-atmosphere climate models with more physically representative parameterisations of exchange of momentum, heat and mass across the air-sea interface will enable quantification of wave driven feedbacks in the coupled climate system.