Uncertainty surrounding the extent of future climate change could be dramatically reduced by studying year-on-year global temperature fluctuations, new research has shown. For detailed explanations on this study, watch online the webinar below by Mark Williamson, co-author of the study. A team of scientists from the University of Exeter and the Centre of Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) […]
Using advanced Earth system models to deliver reliable estimates of future global change Realizing the Paris Agreement: A rapidly closing window of opportunity Human activity, notably the emission of carbon dioxide (CO2), is changing the climate. Presently, only ~50% of emitted CO2 remains in the atmosphere causing the climate to warm. The remaining 50% is […]
There is a wealth of scientific evidence for climate change – enough to fill five IPCC reports – but there is much less known about how to communicate this climate change research to the public. On September 25th CRESCENDO organised a one-day practical workshop for early and mid-career researchers in CRESCENDO to gain knowledge of the science of climate change communication, and the confidence to apply this knowledge in practice with non-academic audiences.
The training day was led by Asher Minns, RT5 leader in CRESCENDO and Head of Communication at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, in partnership with Chris Shaw of Climate Outreach in a workshop co-created by Asher and Adam Corner as part of the HELIX project.
The workshop consisted of 5 sessions and covered a set of very clear aims:
CRESCENDO was heavily-involved in a highly-creative workshop on Model Evaluation at the Aspen Global Change Institute (AGCI) this summer (http://www.agci.org/event/17s2 ). The workshop was co-directed by Veronika Eyring and Peter Cox of CRESCENDO, in partnership with Peter Gleckler (Lawrence Livermore) and Greg Flato (Canadian Climate Centre). Its aims were closely aligned to some of the key goals of CRESCENDO, namely to ‘contribute to reducing the spread of climate projections by enabling more complete evaluation of model outputs against observations, and by identifying Emergent Constraints – observable aspects of the contemporary Earth System that are most closely related to future projections’.
By Alberto Munoz (UNIVLEEDS, UK). This summer CRESCENDO supported the UKESM team (www.ukesm.ac.uk) and the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) to participate at the Royal Society summer science exhibition (3 to 9 July 2017) in London, a unique opportunity to showcase the status of the UK Earth system modelling science and help the general […]
In May 23-24 2017, the European Commission initialised two events involving CRESCENDO in Brussels: The Project interim review after 18 months of improving our Earth System Models (ESMs), and a separate Modelling workshop with the title: Evaluating climate and Earth system models at the process level, co-organised by CRESCENDO in partnership with other three H2020 projects: PRIMAVERA, Blue-Action and APPLICATE. Both meetings were held at the headquarters of EASME (EU Executive Agency for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises).
“Cooperation between Earth System Models and Integrated Assessment Models as done in CRESCENDO will help us to implement the Paris climate targets. It will provide insights on the efforts needed to implement these targets as well as the benefits”. This statement from Colin Jones, CRESCENDO Project Coordinator, was one of the most important take-home messages […]
The meeting of CRESCENDO terrestrial modelling groups was dedicated to the preparation of experiments designed to quantify land use effect on climate. 20 scientists from 7 European ESM groups discussed new aspects of the land use change (LUC) dataset prepared for the historical CMIP6 simulation. This new LUC forcing is much more complex than it was for CMIP5. How could models with different land cover structure interpret LUC scenarios in a consistent way? For example, this new forcing includes rangeland as a new LUC class. Some models assume that rangelands are natural vegetation and ignore the new class, while others treat rangelands as pastures, which are cleaned of forests, and suppress fires etc. Another divergence issue is on sub-grid scale transitions. Several models use so-called gross transitions accounting for crop rotations within grid cell, while others use simplified net transitions. Gross transitions are more difficult to implement; however, they better reflect changes in the land carbon budget. These and other details of the LUC dataset and their usage in ESMs were intensely discussed in a Q&A telecon session with George Hurtt of the University of Maryland, head of the group developing the land use forcing for CMIP6.
The 2nd workshop on the technical development of the Earth System Model Evaluation Tool (ESMValTool) was held at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) in the Department of Geography from 15-16 November 2016. The ESMValTool is developed as a community system, open to both users and developers, hence encouraging open exchange of evaluation methods and results (Eyring et al., 2016c). This will facilitate and improve Earth System Model (ESM) evaluation beyond the state-of-the-art and aims at supporting model evaluation and development activities at individual modelling centres and within the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP). It is envisaged to run the tool routinely on model output submitted to CMIP Phase 6 (CMIP6, Eyring et al. (2016a)), utilizing observations and reanalyses available through the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) in standard formats (obs4MIPs/ana4MIPs) or provided by the user.
To download the workshop summary as pdf click here
By Alberto Muñoz (UNIVLEEDS, UK), Helena Martins (SMHI, Sweden) and Nada Caud (IPSL-CNRS, France).
ClimateChangeWeChange powered by the CRESCENDOschools Network is now live!It is the new web portal to help you better understand our changing planet and the methodologies and process of building Earth system models (ESMs) and climates projections. |
The CRESCENDOschools network has just started work on an exciting new goal of partnering some of our research institutes with nearby schools. We will be working and interacting with 16-18 years old students to co-develop novel, educational and informative materials and activities on climate change and climate models. Three schools in Europe have already embarked on this new venture which will see students, teachers and researchers meeting up over the next year to work together on new ways to share project finding with the wider community and increase awareness and understanding about the science behind climate change.
Is a European Union Horizon 2020 Project funded under the programme SC5-01-2014: Advanced Earth-system models under grant agreement No 641816.
