CICAR, a research partnership between Columbia University and NOAA, facilitates research, education and outreach in the areas of climate physics and climate impacts. CICAR is administered by the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) from its campus in Palisades, New York and is hosted by the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) in Princeton, New Jersey. Combining LDEO and GFDL expertise under CICAR creates a center of excellence for Earth System history, modeling, and analysis. Additionally, CICAR facilitates the involvement of social scientists from the Earth Institute (EI) at Columbia University to study the impact of climate and climate change on society and to develop tools for decision makers in this area.

The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory is NOAA’s center for climate change research through state-of-the art climate modeling methodology and advanced study of ocean and atmospheric dynamics. The goal of GFDL’s research is to understand and predict the Earth’s climate and weather, including the impact of human activities. GFDL conducts leading edge research on many topics including weather and hurricane forecasts, El Nino prediction, stratospheric ozone depletion, and climate change.

The LDEO and EI expertise in general climate and earth science research and education provide a fertile environment to address present and future needs in the fields of climate research and applications and to complement and collaborate with GFDL research groups. Collaborative research efforts extend to more specific fields such as climate modeling and prediction, collection, analysis, and archiving of instrumental and paleoclimate data, and application of climate data and information for decision making and societal risk assessment.

“Partnerships like this one with Columbia University are essential as we work to have a better understanding of Earth’s climate system and how to prepare for and cope with variabilities,” said Ants Leetmaa, GFDL director.

“Both these research communities (CU & GFDL) have long been tied in a common goal to document, understand, and model Earth’s climate history and to predict its behavior on a broad spectrum of time scales,” said CICAR director Yochanan Kushnir. “It is our common intention to continue to work towards these goals and invigorate our collaboration through joint scientific research and educational activities.”

Goal oriented research teams, with members of GFDL and LDEO research staff, are an important way of strengthening the collaboration between LDEO and GFDL. These teams conduct research on themes that help promote both institutes’ scientific agenda. Such collaborative research is facilitated through the involvement of scientists or via jointly supervised or mentored graduate students or postdoctoral fellows. The first of these joint research projects is Understanding Climate Change From the Medieval Warm Period to the Greenhouse Future. In this project, several joint research teams are set to model and understand the changes in global climate and climate variability over the period from 1000AD to 2200AD. The primary purpose of this collaborative research effort is to understand and simulate climate change under external forcing such as solar radiation variability and volcanic eruptions and to put the predicted change due to anthropogenic forcing in the context of changes in the recent past.

Under CICAR, the research parallels and existing relationships between NOAA / GFDL and EI / LDEO are advanced for the benefit of both organizations. As part of the NOAA / OAR Office of Scientific Support Joint Institute Program, CICAR functions as an institutional mechanism working to strengthen the research collaboration between NOAA and the U.S. universities research community.