RAPID-RAPIT
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Oxford
Department Name: Earth Sciences
Abstract
North west Europe has a relatively mild climate in part because of heat pulled north through the Atlantic by the overturning. There is a risk that global warming will cause this circulation to rapidly decrease with consequences involving not only colder winters for Europe but also changes in sea level and precipitation. This project will carry out a risk assessment of rapid changes of the Atlantic overturning. We will use two models of the climate system, HADCM3, the Hadley Centre model used in the IPCC AR4, and CHIME, a global climate model developed at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton. This has the same atmospheric model as HADCM3 but has a very different structure to the ocean component. Making use of the resources of climateprediction.net we will run a large ensemble of both models to assess the uncertainties in the system. We will then use modern Bayesian statistical techniques to combine model output, data and expert opinion in our risk assessment. The utility of the data from the RAPID-WATCH arrays is an important aim of the project.
Organisations
Publications
Baker H
(2018)
Higher CO2 concentrations increase extreme event risk in a 1.5 °C world
in Nature Climate Change
Johnson H
(2013)
Influence of the Southern Annular Mode on Projected Weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation
in Journal of Climate
Marshall D
(2013)
Propagation of Meridional Circulation Anomalies along Western and Eastern Boundaries
in Journal of Physical Oceanography
Marshall D
(2017)
Relative strength of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation
in Tellus A: Dynamic Meteorology and Oceanography
Millar R
(2017)
Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 °C
in Nature Geoscience
Pillar H
(2016)
Dynamical Attribution of Recent Variability in Atlantic Overturning
in Journal of Climate
Sparrow S
(2018)
Finding Ocean States That Are Consistent with Observations from a Perturbed Physics Parameter Ensemble
in Journal of Climate
Williamson D
(2013)
History matching for exploring and reducing climate model parameter space using observations and a large perturbed physics ensemble
in Climate Dynamics
Zhai X
(2014)
A Simple Model of the Response of the Atlantic to the North Atlantic Oscillation
in Journal of Climate
Description | Improved understanding of the risk of Atlantic thermohaline circulation collapse, and of the physics involved. |
Exploitation Route | Results could be used to understand observed variability in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, to improve its representation in climate models, and inform policy-makers about likely future collapse. |
Sectors | Agriculture, Food and Drink,Energy,Environment |