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Understanding rising seas and ice by linking coupled models and past climates

通过连接耦合模型和过去的气候来了解海平面上升和冰层上升

基本信息

批准号：
NE/T007443/1
负责人：
Robin Smith
金额：
$ 80.82万
依托单位：
University of Reading
依托单位国家：
英国
项目类别：
Research Grant
财政年份：
2020
资助国家：
英国
起止时间：
2020 至无数据
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=NE%2FT007443%2F1
关键词：
Understanding rising seas ice linking

项目摘要

Sea level change is one of the mostly widely recognised and potentially serious consequences of climate change due to emissions of greenhouse gases. It concerns both public and policymakers, because of its adverse impact on the populations and ecosystems of coastal and low-lying areas. This impact is expected to increase for centuries to come. Although the impact of major sea level changes may not be felt in the UK for decades or longer, being able to make reliable projections of sea level change now is of large socio-economic benefit. For example, planning decisions need to be made concerning coastal infrastructure, such as the Thames Barrier, that costs billions of pounds and must last for decades.The contribution to sea level change from melting polar ice sheets has already raised global sea levels by around 20mm since 1993, and this rate is expected to grow over the 21st century. It is also the most uncertain part of the sea level change budget, largely because the science of modelling how large ice sheets evolve together with climate has been severely limited by how well climate and ice sheet models work together. Our need to understand the interplay between the physical processes that are resulting in the loss of mass from polar ice sheets and make projections of not only the most likely amount of sea level change, but also to assign probabilities to more extreme cases (which may be less likely, but have much greater impact) is becoming increasingly urgent. For instance, the current ISMIP6 project, an international multi-ice sheet model activity of the World Climate Research Programme, is the first international, collaborative effort to make projections of the ice sheet contribution to future sea-level change within the context of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. However, the present lack of scientific knowledge about the co-evolution of climate and ice sheets requires ice sheet modellers to adopt a number of short-cuts in carrying out projections like this. These short-cuts are needed in the models to describe how the ice sheets may be affected by the changing climate (and vice-versa) and they limit how far ahead into the future we can make projections.The international community are developing new climate and ice sheet models that run together and interact directly with each other. These can help us understand the physics of how climate and ice sheets feed back on each other, but it can be difficult to be sure that these models are accurate, as we do not have many observations of how the feedbacks really operate in practice - the last time major changes in ice sheet and climate happened together on Earth was thousands of years ago. In this project we will combine evidence from those major past changes with modern observations of ice sheets, and use them to assess how well our coupled climate and ice sheet models work and to make the models more physically realistic. This will help us understand more about climate and ice sheet feedback processes, and, using novel statistical methods, will let us make new projections of how ice sheets will change that take account of these feedbacks and can look further into the future. Our improved models will also tell us about how we can make better future sea-level projections when we have to run ice sheet models alone. We ultimately aim to improve our understanding of climate-ice sheet interactions and equip the ice sheet and climate modelling communities with better tools to make future projections of sea level change.

海平面变化是由于温室气体排放而引起的气候变化的最广泛认识和潜在严重后果之一。它涉及公众和决策者，因为它对沿海和低洼地区的人口和生态系统产生不利影响。这种影响预计将在未来几个世纪增加。虽然英国可能在几十年或更长时间内不会感受到海平面变化的影响，但现在能够对海平面变化进行可靠的预测具有很大的社会经济效益。例如，需要对耗资数十亿英镑且必须持续数十年的泰晤士河屏障等沿海基础设施做出规划决策。自1993年以来，极地冰盖融化对海平面变化的贡献已经使全球海平面上升了约20毫米，预计这一速度将在世纪继续增长。这也是海平面变化预算中最不确定的部分，主要是因为模拟大冰盖如何与气候一起演变的科学受到气候和冰盖模型协同工作的严重限制。我们需要了解导致极地冰盖质量损失的物理过程之间的相互作用，不仅要预测最可能的海平面变化量，还要为更极端的情况（可能不太可能，但影响更大）分配概率，这变得越来越紧迫。例如，目前的ISMIP 6项目是世界气候研究方案的一项国际多冰盖模型活动，是在政府间气候变化专门委员会范围内预测冰盖对未来海平面变化的影响的第一个国际协作努力。然而，目前缺乏关于气候和冰盖共同演变的科学知识，这要求冰盖建模者在进行此类预测时采取一些捷径。在模型中需要这些捷径来描述冰盖如何受到气候变化的影响（反之亦然），它们限制了我们对未来的预测。国际社会正在开发新的气候和冰盖模型，这些模型可以一起运行并直接相互作用。这些可以帮助我们理解气候和冰盖如何相互反馈的物理学，但很难确保这些模型是准确的，因为我们没有太多关于反馈在实践中如何运作的观察结果-上一次冰盖和气候的重大变化在地球上一起发生是几千年前。在这个项目中，我们将把联合收割机从过去那些主要变化中获得的证据与现代对冰盖的观测结合起来，并利用它们来评估我们的气候和冰盖耦合模型的工作情况，并使模型更加物理逼真。这将帮助我们更多地了解气候和冰盖反馈过程，并使用新的统计方法，使我们能够对冰盖将如何变化做出新的预测，考虑到这些反馈，并可以进一步展望未来。我们改进的模型还将告诉我们，当我们必须单独运行冰盖模型时，我们如何才能更好地预测未来的海平面。我们的最终目标是提高我们对气候冰盖相互作用的理解，并为冰盖和气候建模社区提供更好的工具，以预测未来的海平面变化。