Climate Extremes and Variability – Evaluating the Risks (CLEVER)
University of Bath: Nicholas Mitchell
University of Bristol: Dan Lunt
Cardiff University: Ian Hall
University of Exeter: Tim Lenton (PI)
Background
Recent extreme weather in the UK has highlighted the fact that climate change will impact most severely though extreme events, such as floods, droughts and heat waves. However, the link between climate change and extreme weather events remains unclear, and this hinders any attempts to make human and natural systems more resilient to future extreme events (UNEP, 2013). There is now an urgent need to provide better guidance on the risk of extreme events and how this risk varies with the underlying climate state. It is also clear that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change concept of “dangerous climate change” is most clearly manifest in the climate system through past and possible future non-linear impacts and climate “tipping points” (Lenton et al., 2008). Therefore, the climate adaptation and mitigation agendas both demand that we move away from the projection of smooth changes in the mean climate state (and the resulting concept of “climate sensitivity”) to consider how the mean state affects the risk of extreme events and whether the mean state could itself change abruptly. The GW4 Institutions have complementary expertise in abrupt climate change (Exeter/Bristol/Cardiff), ocean-atmosphere dynamics (Bath/Exeter), quantitative palaeoclimate reconstruction (Cardiff/Bristol/Exeter), numerical methods (Bath/Exeter), and past and future climate modelling (Bristol/Exeter).
Lenton et al. (2008) Tipping Elements in the Earth’s Climate System PNAS 105, 1786-1793 (534 ISI citations)
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP, 2013) Research Priorities on Vulnerability, Impacts and Adaptation: Responding to the climate change challenge
Project Summary
The community used Initiator funding to hold a workshop facilitating interdisciplinary discussions to address key challenges in climate variability. The workshop identified multiple research opportunities, formed new collaborations and established a cross-institutional community. The community have begun working on a synthesis paper and have identified key research opportunities for GW4 that will go into a grant proposal. The community also strengthened links between paleoclimate modelling research within GW4 and state-of-the-art predictive model development at the Met Office.
