event
Monday 25 Nov 2013: How predictable is the effect of climate change on the atmospheric circulation? (Taylor and Francis sponsored)
Prof Ted Shepherd - Grantham Professor of Climate Science, Department of Meteorology, University of Reading
Laver LT 6 15:00-16:00
Although climate change is often characterised as "global warming", the impact of climate change will vary greatly from region to region. Regional aspects of climate change are controlled by atmospheric circulation patterns, which moreover exhibit considerable chaotic variability. Model predictions of the atmospheric circulation response to climate change are in many cases highly uncertain, presumably because of systematic errors in the climate models (e.g. the location of the jet stream). The fact that these errors have stubbornly persisted despite increases in spatial resolution suggests that they are somehow linked to unresolved processes, whose effects need to be parameterised in the models. Thus, improving climate models requires a better understanding of multi-scale interactions. There are good reasons to believe that model bias, the divergence of model projections, and chaotic variability are somehow related. This talk will present some examples of these kinds of uncertainties and some potential ways forward.
