Laboratory Research Manager:

William D. Collins, Associate Laboratory Director, Earth and Environmental Sciences, LBNL

Three major, interrelated Big Science questions drive CASCADE’s research program:

• How have changes in the physical behavior of the coupled Earth system altered the chances of encountering and the nature of extreme climate events?
• To what degree are environmental drivers responsible for altering the chances of encountering and the nature of extreme climate events?
• What are the dominant sources of uncertainty in detecting, charactering, attributing, and modeling extremes, how do these uncertainties change our answers to the first two questions, and how can we minimize or mitigate these uncertainties?

Addressing these three interrelated questions, with their underlying statistical and computational needs, requires a large and interdisciplinary team that is beyond the scope of a traditional academic project.

The CASCADE project is a multidivisional, collaborative work at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), drawing upon expertise of scientists in the lab’s Computational Research Division and Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division as well as the University of California, Berkeley, and University of California, Davis campuses. CASCADE scientists collaborate with related projects at LBNL and across BER’s climate modeling efforts. These projects include Earth system modeling efforts; land, ocean, and atmosphere diagnostics projects; and stakeholder-driven science projects. The resulting connections and related projects ensure tight integration of observations, experiments, and modeling of extreme climate events. CASCADE is also active in national and international scientific communities, including CMIP, SAMSI, ARTIP, etc.