Decadal and Regional Climate Prediction using Earth System Models | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The "Decadal and Regional Climate Prediction using Earth System Models" opportunity (NSF Publication 13-607) is a joint funding solicitation led by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). It is designed to push climate science beyond broad, long-term projections by improving the ability to understand and predict climate variability and change on the more immediately relevant decadal and shorter time scales. The program is motivated by real-world impacts that have become harder to ignore, including prolonged droughts, more frequent flooding, reduced agricultural and forest productivity, ecosystem degradation in oceans and permafrost regions, rising sea levels, rapid retreat of glaciers and ice sheets, shrinking Arctic sea ice, and shifts in ocean circulation. The core idea is that these changes are already affecting human and natural systems, and better predictions over the next 10 years or so are crucial for planning, risk management, and adaptation decisions.

A central theme of the solicitation is the development and application of next-generation Earth System Models (ESMs). Rather than treating climate as mostly atmospheric physics, the program emphasizes fully coupled modeling that represents interactive processes across the ocean, atmosphere, land, ice, and living systems, and that can also reflect human-driven land use and management where relevant. The solicitation specifically points to components such as ocean and atmospheric currents, agricultural working lands and forests, biogeochemistry, atmospheric chemistry, the water cycle, and land ice. The goal is not only to add more pieces, but to represent the feedbacks among them in a realistic way, since many of the biggest decadal-scale risks come from interactions (for example, drought affecting vegetation and soil moisture, which then affects regional climate; or ocean circulation changes influencing heat storage and storm patterns).

The opportunity is intentionally interdisciplinary and is meant to pull together teams spanning geosciences, agricultural sciences, mathematics, statistics, and related computational fields. NSF and USDA structured this as an interagency effort to combine resources, reduce duplication, and encourage collaboration among investigators supported by different mission-driven agencies. The solicitation also highlights broader impacts as a priority: proposals are encouraged to provide public access to data and research products that others can use, and to include educational, diversity, and societal benefits that extend beyond the immediate research results.

While the broader Earth System Modeling (EaSM) program has multiple long-term goals, this particular solicitation (EaSM 3) focuses primarily on improving predictive capability (Goal 1). In practice, that means proposals should be geared toward making decadal climate predictions more comprehensive, more reliable, and more useful at global and regional scales by advancing understanding of coupled physical, chemical, biological, and human processes that drive the climate system, including processes connected to agriculture, forestry, and land cover or land use. In addition, the solicitation recognizes that strong decadal prediction requires careful handling of uncertainty and evaluation, so it calls for methods that can test model performance, compare predictions against observations, and communicate uncertainty in ways that can support downstream uses.

The program identifies several specific decadal-scale research emphasis areas. First, it seeks research with the potential to dramatically improve predictive capabilities, meaning work that can lead to step-changes in model skill rather than incremental tuning. Second, it supports prediction and attribution studies, which link observed changes and predicted changes to underlying drivers and mechanisms, helping distinguish natural variability from forced trends and clarifying why particular regional outcomes occur. Third, it encourages the development and application of metrics, methods, and tools for testing and evaluating both climate predictions and climate-impact predictions, including rigorous characterization of uncertainty. This reflects a practical need: decision makers and impacts researchers need not only a prediction, but also a credible estimate of confidence, limits, and conditions under which a prediction is expected to perform well.

From an administrative and funding standpoint, the opportunity is a discretionary grant competition in the Science and Technology and other Research and Development category. The estimated total funding is $18,000,000, with an expectation of about 8 awards. Individual awards are anticipated to fall between $2,000,000 (floor) and $3,000,000 (ceiling). The solicitation states there is no cost sharing or matching requirement. The original posting date was September 23, 2013, with a full proposal deadline of December 23, 2013, and an archive date of January 7, 2014.

The solicitation is tied to multiple CFDA program areas, reflecting its crosscutting nature across NSF and USDA missions. Listed CFDA numbers include USDA AFRI (10.310) and a wide range of NSF directorates and offices such as Engineering (47.041), Mathematical and Physical Sciences (47.049), Geosciences (47.050), Computer and Information Science and Engineering (47.070), Biological Sciences (47.074), Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (47.075), Education and Human Resources (47.076), the Office of International Science and Engineering (47.079), and EPSCoR (47.081). This breadth signals that competitive projects could involve advances in climate dynamics, land and ecosystem modeling, statistical prediction and uncertainty quantification, downscaling, computational methods, and potentially human dimensions relevant to land use and management.

Eligibility is nuanced and includes special provisions for Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs). Principal Investigators from NSF-funded FFRDCs are allowed to submit proposals to the competition. Projects involving USDA FFRDCs can be considered for co-funding by NSF only if they are collaborative efforts that include non-federally funded institutions, and in those cases an institution other than the USDA FFRDC must serve as the lead. USDA research laboratories submitting as the lead institution are only considered for funding by USDA NIFA. The solicitation also emphasizes standard NSF budgeting constraints for FFRDCs: proposal budgets cannot include costs already covered by federal funds.

Overall, this opportunity is best understood as a targeted investment in the science and tools needed to make decadal and regional climate prediction more accurate, testable, and actionable. It aims to strengthen Earth System Models as integrated prediction systems, build interdisciplinary research teams that can tackle coupled processes and feedbacks, and produce outputs (data, methods, evaluation tools) that support both scientific progress and practical assessment of climate risks over the time horizons where many planning and adaptation decisions are made.

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