An integrated research infrastructure concept with multidisciplinary observations on climate change

Author(s):  
Jaana Bäck ◽  
Tuukka Petäjä ◽  
Mari Pihlatie ◽  
Janne Levula ◽  
Timo Vesala ◽  
...  

<p>The observations on global warming or elements relevant to climate change are frequently performed in isolation, which results in insufficient understanding of the whole Earth system functioning and feedbacks. Frequently CO2 emissions, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and the global air temperature records are pooled together to obtain statistical relationships and correlations between them. However, forecasting future changes and designing tools for mitigating their deleterious effects would require a more holistic and comprehensive observation scheme. We propose a concept of an integrated research infrastructure, where the feedbacks can be analysed with multidisciplinary and comprehensive observations. The SMEAR concept (Station for Measuring Earth system-Atmosphere Relations) has been developing into a powerful tool, allowing detection of trends in key climate, atmosphere and ecosystem parameters, providing detailed process understanding of atmosphere and ecosystem structure and functions, and facilitating deep insights on feedbacks between the ecosystems and atmosphere. The presentation gives examples of recent novel results, especially in the perspective of climate change feedbacks and mitigation in forest ecosystems.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fanny Adloff ◽  
Bryan Lawrence ◽  
Sylvie Joussaume ◽  
Michael Lautenschlager ◽  
Janette Bessembinder ◽  
...  

<p>The last few decades have seen a range of advances in climate science and consequential policy initiatives at both national and international levels. These advances have been built on the back of progress in modelling and in part been enabled by the global data sharing initiative - the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) - which has underpinned recent phases of the World Climate Research Programme's Coupled Model Intercomparison Projects.  </p><p>The ESGF itself consists of data nodes deployed by individual modelling centres and a backbone of software development and services delivered by a few core institutions. Within Europe, along with some shared development of model components, these core ESGF software development and services are coordinated by the European Network on Earth System Modelling (ENES) and supported by the H2020 IS-ENES Phase 3 research infrastructure project.  </p><p>We provide an historical overview on advances in policy-relevant science, such as the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), that have been enabled by long-term underpinning development and funding of the ENES and ESGF infrastructure. We illustrate the recent shift of research funding from physical science objectives alone towards funding services to society (and the necessary underpinning research). We stress the potential dangers of underfunding research infrastructures that need to be simultaneously flexible and reliable enough to serve both ongoing basic research and the growing societal objectives, as emphasised by the development of climate services such as Copernicus Climate Change Service. We conclude by presenting some steps towards sustaining such research infrastructure in the context of the ENES and the possible futures of climate science.</p>


Author(s):  
Hyun Min Sung ◽  
Jisun Kim ◽  
Sungbo Shim ◽  
Jeong-byn Seo ◽  
Sang-Hoon Kwon ◽  
...  

AbstractThe National Institute of Meteorological Sciences-Korea Meteorological Administration (NIMS-KMA) has participated in the Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project (CMIP) and provided long-term simulations using the coupled climate model. The NIMS-KMA produces new future projections using the ensemble mean of KMA Advanced Community Earth system model (K-ACE) and UK Earth System Model version1 (UKESM1) simulations to provide scientific information of future climate changes. In this study, we analyze four experiments those conducted following the new shared socioeconomic pathway (SSP) based scenarios to examine projected climate change in the twenty-first century. Present day (PD) simulations show high performance skill in both climate mean and variability, which provide a reliability of the climate models and reduces the uncertainty in response to future forcing. In future projections, global temperature increases from 1.92 °C to 5.20 °C relative to the PD level (1995–2014). Global mean precipitation increases from 5.1% to 10.1% and sea ice extent decreases from 19% to 62% in the Arctic and from 18% to 54% in the Antarctic. In addition, climate changes are accelerating toward the late twenty-first century. Our CMIP6 simulations are released to the public through the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) international data sharing portal and are used to support the establishment of the national adaptation plan for climate change in South Korea.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Gabriel Lopez Porras

Despite international efforts to stop dryland degradation and expansion, current dryland pathways are predicted to result in large-scale migration, growing poverty and famine, and increasing climate change, land degradation, conflicts and water scarcity. Earth system science has played a key role in analysing dryland problems, and has been even incorporated in global assessments such as the ones made by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. However, policies addressing dryland degradation, like the ‘Mexican programme for the promotion of sustainable land management’, do not embrace an Earth system perspective, so they do not consider the complexity and non-linearity that underlie dryland problems. By exploring how this Mexican programme could integrate the Earth system perspective, this paper discusses how ’Earth system’ policies could better address dryland degradation and expansion in the Anthropocene.


Tellus B ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Laura Riuttanen ◽  
Taina Ruuskanen ◽  
Mikko Äijälä ◽  
Anniina Lauri

2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. n/a-n/a ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin L. McClymont ◽  
Raja S. Ganeshram ◽  
Laetitia E. Pichevin ◽  
Helen M. Talbot ◽  
Bart E. van Dongen ◽  
...  

2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (9-10) ◽  
pp. 2123-2165 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.-L. Dufresne ◽  
M.-A. Foujols ◽  
S. Denvil ◽  
A. Caubel ◽  
O. Marti ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Alan M. Haywood ◽  
Andy Ridgwell ◽  
Daniel J. Lunt ◽  
Daniel J. Hill ◽  
Matthew J. Pound ◽  
...  

Given the inherent uncertainties in predicting how climate and environments will respond to anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases, it would be beneficial to society if science could identify geological analogues to the human race’s current grand climate experiment . This has been a focus of the geological and palaeoclimate communities over the last 30 years, with many scientific papers claiming that intervals in Earth history can be used as an analogue for future climate change. Using a coupled ocean–atmosphere modelling approach, we test this assertion for the most probable pre-Quaternary candidates of the last 100 million years: the Mid- and Late Cretaceous, the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), the Early Eocene, as well as warm intervals within the Miocene and Pliocene epochs. These intervals fail as true direct analogues since they either represent equilibrium climate states to a long-term CO 2 forcing—whereas anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases provide a progressive (transient) forcing on climate—or the sensitivity of the climate system itself to CO 2 was different. While no close geological analogue exists, past warm intervals in Earth history provide a unique opportunity to investigate processes that operated during warm (high CO 2 ) climate states. Palaeoclimate and environmental reconstruction/modelling are facilitating the assessment and calculation of the response of global temperatures to increasing CO 2 concentrations in the longer term (multiple centuries); this is now referred to as the Earth System Sensitivity, which is critical in identifying CO 2 thresholds in the atmosphere that must not be crossed to avoid dangerous levels of climate change in the long term. Palaeoclimatology also provides a unique and independent way to evaluate the qualities of climate and Earth system models used to predict future climate.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolina Gallo Granizo ◽  
Jonathan Eden ◽  
Bastien Dieppois ◽  
Matthew Blackett

<p>Weather and climate play an important role in shaping global fire regimes and geographical distributions of burnable areas. At the global scale, fire danger is likely to increase in the near future due to warmer temperatures and changes in precipitation patterns, as projected by the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). There is a need to develop the most reliable projections of future climate-driven fire danger to enable decision makers and forest managers to take both targeted proactive actions and to respond to future fire events.</p><p>Climate change projections generated by Earth System Models (ESMs) provide the most important basis for understanding past, present and future changes in the climate system and its impacts. ESMs are, however, subject to systematic errors and biases, which are not fully taken into account when developing risk scenarios for wild fire activity. Projections of climate-driven fire danger have often been limited to the use of single models or the mean of multi-model ensembles, and compared to a single set of observational data (e.g. one index derived from one reanalysis).</p><p>Here, a comprehensive global evaluation of the representation of a series of fire weather indicators in the latest generation of ESMs is presented. Seven fire weather indices from the Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index System were generated using daily fields realisations simulated by 25 ESMs from the 6<sup>th</sup> Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6). With reference to observational and reanalysis datasets, we quantify the capacity of each model to realistically simulate the variability, magnitude and spatial extent of fire danger. The highest-performing models are identified and, subsequently, the limitations of combining models based on independency and equal performance when generating fire danger projections are discussed. To conclude, recommendations are given for the development of user- and policy-driven model evaluation at spatial scales relevant for decision-making and forest management.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Petzold ◽  
Valerie Thouret ◽  
Christoph Gerbig ◽  
Andreas Zahn ◽  
Martin Gallagher ◽  
...  

<p>IAGOS (www.iagos.org) is a European Research Infrastructure using commercial aircraft (Airbus A340, A330, and soon A350) for automatic and routine measurements of atmospheric composition including reactive gases (ozone, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds), greenhouse gases (water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane), aerosols and cloud particles along with essential thermodynamic parameters. The main objective of IAGOS is to provide the most complete set of high-quality essential climate variables (ECV) covering several decades for the long-term monitoring of climate and air quality. The observations are stored in the IAGOS data centre along with added-value products to facilitate the scientific interpretation of the data. IAGOS began as two European projects, MOZAIC and CARIBIC, in the early 1990s. These projects demonstrated that commercial aircraft are ideal platforms for routine atmospheric measurements. IAGOS then evolved as a European Research Infrastructure offering a mature and sustainable organization for the benefits of the scientific community and for the operational services in charge of air quality and climate change issues such as the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Services (CAMS) and the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). IAGOS is also a contributing network of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).</p> <p>IAGOS provides measurements of numerous chemical compounds which are recorded simultaneously in the critical region of the upper troposphere – lower stratosphere (UTLS) and geographical regions such as Africa and the mid-Pacific which are poorly sampled by other means. The data are used by hundreds of groups worldwide performing data analysis for climatology and trend studies, model evaluation, satellite validation and the study of detailed chemical and physical processes around the tropopause. IAGOS data also play an important role in the re-assessment of the climate impact of aviation.</p> <p>Most important in the context of weather-related research, IAGOS and its predecessor programmes provide long-term observations of water vapour and relative humidity with respect to ice in the UTLS as well as throughout the tropospheric column during climb-out and descending phases around airports, now for more than 25 years. The high quality and very good resolution of IAGOS observations of relative humidity over ice are used to better understand the role of water vapour and of ice-supersaturated air masses in the tropopause region and to improve their representation in numerical weather and climate forecasting models. Furthermore, CAMS is using the water vapour vertical profiles in near real time for the continuous validation of the CAMS atmospheric models. </p>


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