Computing infrastructure for simulating the global and regional climate response to cumulative emissions

在过去五年中，将气候变化作为累积二氧化碳排放量的函数进行测量的想法已经成为一种简单而有效的工具，可以用来理解和量化全球温度对人类排放的反应。特别是，气候变暖对累积碳排放量的线性反应的发现是一种强有力的方式来框架气候问题，并为改变我们如何应对气候缓解以及更好地预测与特定排放途径相关的气候影响开辟了途径。 迄今为止，该研究领域仅关注量化由CO2累积排放导致的全球平均温度变化。相对而言，对非二氧化碳气体累积排放的气候反应的研究要少得多，这些气体对历史上三分之一以上的气候变暖负有责任。此外，大多数气候影响表现在局部尺度上，是对温度和降水的区域变化的反应。因此，有必要将空间信息纳入累积排放框架，以便更好地将人类排放与地方和区域气候变化和影响联系起来。 在这项拟议的研究中，我将建立一个建模框架，以（a）量化全球气候对CO2和非CO2温室气体排放的响应，（B）将当前全球温度和累积排放之间的关系扩展到区域范围，从而将人类温室气体排放直接与当地气候变化联系起来。

The idea of measuring climate change as a function of cumulative CO2 emissions has emerged in the past five years as a simple and effective tool to understand and quantify how global temperatures respond to human emissions. In particular, the finding that climate warming responds linearly to cumulative carbon emissions is a powerful way to frame the climate problem, and opens avenues for both changing how we approach climate mitigation, as well as better predicting the climate impacts associated with a given emission pathway. This research area has focussed to date only on quantifying the globally-averaged temperature change that results from cumulative emissions of CO2. There has been relatively much less study of the climate response to cumulative emissions non-CO2 gases, which are responsibly for more than a third of historical climate warming. Furthermore, most climate impacts manifest at a local scale, in response to regional changes in temperature and precipitation. Consequently, there is a need to incorporate spatial information into the cumulative emissions framework to so as to better link human emissions to local and regional climate changes and impacts. In this proposed research, I will build a modelling framework to (a) quantify the global climate response to both CO2 and non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions, and (b) expand the current global relationship between temperature and cumulative emissions to a regional scale, thereby linking human greenhouse gas emissions directly to local climate changes.