RAPID-RAPIT
Lead Research Organisation:
National Oceanography Centre
Department Name: Science and Technology
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. An assessment of the utility of the data from the RAPID-WATCH arrays is an important aim of the project.
Publications
Allison L
(2014)
An event-based approach to understanding decadal fluctuations in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation
in Climate Dynamics
Ba J
(2013)
A mechanism for Atlantic multidecadal variability in the Kiel Climate Model
in Climate Dynamics
Dare R
(2013)
The Different Impact of Positive-Neutral and Negative-Neutral ENSO Regimes on Australian Tropical Cyclones
in Journal of Climate
Franzke C
(2013)
Predictions of critical transitions with non-stationary reduced order models
in Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena
Hawkins E
(2011)
Bistability of the Atlantic overturning circulation in a global climate model and links to ocean freshwater transport BISTABILITY OF THE ATLANTIC MOC
in Geophysical Research Letters
Messori G
(2013)
Some considerations on the spectral features of meridional heat transport by transient eddies
in Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society
Rougier J
(2014)
Climate Simulators and Climate Projections
in Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application
Williamson D
(2012)
Fast Linked Analyses for Scenario-Based Hierarchies
in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series C: Applied Statistics
Williamson D
(2014)
Evolving Bayesian Emulators for Structured Chaotic Time Series, with Application to Large Climate Models
in SIAM/ASA Journal on Uncertainty Quantification
Williamson D
(2013)
History matching for exploring and reducing climate model parameter space using observations and a large perturbed physics ensemble
in Climate Dynamics
| Description | We have developed methods to estimate the parameters in complex numerical models using relatively small ensembles of model runs and applied these to the climate model HadCM3 |
| Exploitation Route | We are submitting further proposals to develop the ideas further. we are hoping that some of the methods will be taken up operationally by the Met Office |
| Sectors | Environment,Healthcare,Manufacturing, including Industrial Biotechology |
| Description | We have contributed to the international review of the RAPID-MOC array and to the Met Office |
| First Year Of Impact | 2012 |
| Sector | Environment |
| Impact Types | Societal |