Exploitation of HiGEM as a tool for understanding decadal climate variability and for predicting the climate of the next few decades.

The fact that Earth's climate is changing is now widely accepted; the consequences of this fact are only just beginning to be understood. The changing climate will have a very wide range of impacts - for example, on water resources, on agriculture, on ecosystems and economies. If planners are to minimise the costs of these impacts they require detailed information about how climate will change regionally and locally, especially over the next few decades. Providing this information is a major challenge to scientists. This proposal will address this challenge by making use of a new UK climate model, HiGEM, which provides unprecedented spatial detail. It will investigate how the changes in climate projected by the HiGEM model differ from those suggested by simpler models that provide less detail. It will also examine how observations of recent changes can be used in conjunction with climate models to obtain the best possible predictions.