Robust Spatial Projections of Real-World Climate Change

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Climate change is one of the leading global challenges facing society and the planet. Predicting how the climate will change as human activities lead to emission of more greenhouse gases is a global scientific challenge for climate scientists.We use models of the climate to make predictions. Because of limitations in computing power, and because of gaps in our understanding of the climate, these models are not perfect. Predictions from the models are, therefore, also not perfect. We are faced by the huge challenge of extracting robust information from climate models about how real-world climate will change in the future under specified scenarios of different greenhouse gas emissions. Such projections are central to leading climate change assessments, such as those produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).This project will provide a step-change in the ability of climate scientists to produce robust projections of climate change and to quantify the uncertainties in projections. A new framework will be developed that combines information from models, observations and our basic understanding of climate with modern statistical techniques to produce projections. This new framework will be applied to three important climate regimes of Earth: tropical and subtropical temperature and precipitation change; middle latitude cyclones and anti-cyclones; and polar temperature and sea-ice changes.We will bring together leading UK scientists (many are IPCC authors) from the Universities of Exeter, Reading, Oxford and East Anglia, and the Met Office, to address this grand challenge in climate science. We aim to precipitate a cultural shift that unifies diverse approaches from techniques to understand climate process and statistical methods and consolidate the UKs position as a world-leading centre for climate projection science.