RAPID-RAPIT
Lead Research Organisation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
Department Name: Centre for the Analysis of Time Series
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.
Publications
Chapman S
(2015)
Limits to the quantification of local climate change
in Environmental Research Letters
Chapman SC
(2013)
On estimating local long-term climate trends.
in Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences
Stainforth D
(2013)
Mapping climate change in European temperature distributions
in Environmental Research Letters
| Description | This work has developed ways of evaluating how uncertainty in the starting conditions of a system affect how long the behaviour remains close to what happens if the starting conditions were known perfectly. This is valuable in interpreting weather and climate predictions and in evaluating different methods of incorporating (assimilating) observational data into computer models. |
| Exploitation Route | Prediction, including climate prediction, has value in many non-academic contexts. This work will provide an important means of understanding and evaluating such activities and will therefore also have non-academic value. This work will be important in evaluating weather and climate predictions as well as data assimilation techniques in various settings. |
| Sectors | Environment |
| Description | Warwick/LSE |
| Organisation | University of Warwick |
| Department | School of Engineering |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Conceptual analysis of what climate change means locally and understanding of the available local climatic datasets. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Mathematical analysis of what climate change means locally in terms of quantile dynamics. |
| Impact | This is a multi-disciplinary collaboration which involves climate physics, complexity science, quantile dynamics (maths), nonlinear dynamics. Three papers have resulted from this collaboration. |
| Start Year | 2012 |
| Description | Royal Society Summer Exhibition 2011 - Confidence From Uncertainty: Interpreting Climate Predictions |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | Yes |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The RS exhibition was attended by >13000 people that year. The PI and colleagues across the LSE - including the RAPID-RAPIT student Ed Wheatcroft - managed the exhibit and spent the week discussing the research with school childrebn, members of teh public and VIPs. - |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2011 |