Climatic Research Unit

Research

Quick links to current projects:
CIRCE
CLARIS LPB
ClimGen website
DeSurvey
ECOCHANGE
ENSEMBLES
Regional Scenarios Portal
EUCAARI
IPCC-DDC
LINK
RAPID
SKCC
Tiempo

Quick links to completed projects:
ACCELERATES
ACCORD
ADVANCE-10K
ADVICE
BETWIXT
BIOCLIM
Blueprint
CLIMAG
CLIWOC
CRANIUM
ECLAT-2
EMULATE
HIHOL
HOLSMEER
IMPROVE
MAGICC
MEDALUS
MICE
POWER
PRUDENCE
SCENGEN
SO&P
SPECTRE
STARDEX
Storms
SWURVE
WISE
WRINCLE


Current projects

Project Title Project Description Investigators Start/End
ARCADIA The aim of ARCADIA is to provide system-scale understanding of the inter-relationships between climate impacts, the urban economy, land use, transport and the built environment and to use this understanding to design cities that are more resilient and adaptable. The project has four specific objectives. These are:
  1. To develop methods for generating of city-scale climate change scenarios that are consistent with UKCIP08.
  2. To develop and demonstrate new methods to analyse the interactions between climate impacts and the regional and urban economy.
  3. To analyse the relationship between the spatial configuration of cities and their resilience to climate impacts.
  4. To provide decision support tools for adaptation of urban areas, and to work with stakeholders to demonstrate how these tools can be used to develop strategies for transitions to resilience at a city scale.
Whilst focussed upon London, the research will develop methodologies that are generally applicable to UK cities.
Phil Jones (PI), Clare Goodess 07/09 – 06/12
CIRCE This EU integrated project, led by Antonio Navarra in Italy and Laurence Tubiana in France aims at developing an assessment of climate change impacts in the Mediterranean area. It encompasses physical impacts, as well as the socio-economic consequences. Stakeholder involvement, at both local and regional level, is an important concern. CRU’s main role is to co-ordinate 11 integrated case-studies focusing on cross-sectoral impacts and adaptation options. CRU will also contribute to work on extreme events, focusing on temperature. Clare Goodess (PI), Maureen Agnew, Tom Holt 04/07 – 03/11
ClimateCost ClimateCost aims to inform policy on a) long-term targets, b) the costs of inaction (the economic effects of climate change), and c) the costs and benefits of adaptation. CRU is involved in work on the selection, development and provision of consistent climate and socio-economic scenarios, including mitigation scenarios. These scenarios will then be used by project partners in a number of bottom-up sectoral impacts and adaptation analyses. Clare Goodess (PI), Ian Harris 12/08 – 07/11
CLARIS LPB The CLARIS LPB Project aims at predicting the regional climate change impacts in the La Plata Basin (LPB) in South America, and at designing adaptation strategies for land-use, agriculture, rural development, hydropower production, river transportation, water resources and ecological systems in wetlands. Phil Jones (PI), Clare Goodess 10/08 – 09/12
DeSurvey The ambition of the DeSurvey consortium is to deliver a compact set of integrated procedures of desertification assessment and forecasting, with application and tutorial examples at the EU and national scales. The performance of DeSurvey in other desertification threatened areas of UNCCD regional Annexes will be also tested against other expertise and available procedures CRU are developing much of the observational datasets for the assessments across Europe. Phil Jones 03/05 – 03/10
ECOCHANGE details to be added Keith Briffa 01/07 – 12/11
ENSEMBLES

Regional Scenarios Portal

This EU integrated project on ENSEMBLE based predictions of climate changes and their impacts uses the collective expertise of 66 institutes to develop a reliable quantitative risk assessment of climate change and its impacts on timeframes ranging from seasonal to decadal and longer, at global, regional, and local spatial scales. CRU is involved in six of the 10 ENSEMBLES research themes, encompassing data analysis, downscaling, extreme events, impacts, and communication and dissemination activities. Treatment of uncertainty is a major focus of ENSEMBLES, and Clare Goodess is co-ordinator of work on the development of probabilistic regional projections of climate change. Clare Goodess (PI),
Phil Jones,
Tom Holt
09/04 – 08/09
EUCAARI The European Integrated project on Aerosol Cloud Climate and Air Quality Interactions, EUCAARI, brings together the leading European research groups, state-of-the-art infrastructure and key players from third countries to investigate the role of aerosol on climate and air quality. The two principal objectives of EUCAARI are (1) reduction of the current uncertainty of the impact of aerosol particles on climate by 50% and quantification of the relationship between anthropogenic aerosol particles and regional air quality, and (2) quantification of the side effects of European air quality directives on global and regional climate, and provide tools for future quantifications for different stakeholders. The involvement of CRU is in validation of some of the climate models used. Phil Jones 01/07 – 12/10
LINK This project follows on from earlier projects co-ordinated within CRU since the early 1990s. The purpose of the past LINK projects have been to make Hadley Centre GCM and RCM output (together with some observational datasets) available in a user-friendly manner to researchers working principally in the impact sectors. The project is now co- ordinated by the British Atmospheric Data Centre (at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory), but CRU is still involved determining observational requirements necessary for users. Phil Jones 02/07 – 07/08
LUCINDA This small EU project on Land Care in Desertification-Affected Areas: from Science Towards Application, aims to disseminate results from 28 previous research projects on the Mediterranean through the production of booklets, DVDs, an interactive website and so on. CRU’s role is to write a booklet on climate change. Clare Goodess 01/07 – 03/08
SCORCHIO This EPSRC-funded project on Sustainable Cities: Options for Responding to Climate Change Impacts and Outcomes focuses on Manchester and Sheffield. It aims to incorporate the effects of the urban landscape and the heat released by human activities into future climate projections, and then to assess options and strategies for adaptation. CRU’s main role is to incorporate the stochastic weather generator developed for UKCIP08 into the suite of modelling approaches being used. Clare Goodess (CO-I),
Phil Jones, (PI)
Colin Harpham
03/07 – 08/09
SKCC Sustaining Knowledge for a Changing Climate aims to sustain the researcher and end user community assembled around the EPSRC-funded Building Knowledge for a Changing Climate (BKCC) research programme. CRU’s main role has been to organise a workshop on the use of probabilistic climate projections held at UEA in November 2006. SKCC is also developing a coherent user-led plan for future research into the impacts of climate change on the built environment and infrastructure (BKCC2). Clare Goodess (CO-I),
Phil Jones (PI)
04/06 – 03/08
UKCIP08 UKCIP08 will represent the fifth generation of national climate scenarios for the UK. Over that time, climate models have evolved and now represent the climate system and provide greater spatial and temporal details than ever before. Nevertheless, different climate models continue to give quite different projections at a local scale. At the same time, there has been much research on using multiple climate model simulations using the large ‘ensembles’ available from many modelling centres, which enable a systematic exploration of modelling uncertainties. The UKCIP08 scenarios will be officially launched in October 2008. CRU’s involvement is in the development of a Weather Generator, which will be used in conjunction with the Hadley Centre probabilistic climate projections to provide spatial and temporal detail (down to 5km squares and hourly duration). Phil Jones 01/07 – 12/09
UKIERI This is a four-year programme of collaborative research between the UK and India on ‘Science of Regional Climate Change, Variability and Impacts’, funded under the UK-India Education and Research Initiative. The project is led by Julia Slingo at the University of Reading and provides money for an Indian PhD studentship at CRU on the development and application of statistical downscaling methods for India – expected to start in October 2008. Funding is also available for a workshop on downscaling methods to be held at UEA in summer 2008. Clare Goodess 06/07 – 03/11
USDoE The aims of this proposal are to develop and analyse a number of observational datasets for the purpose of evaluating General Circulation Models (GCMs) and Regional Climate Models (RCMs). The model evaluation will assess the variability of both GCMs and RCMs at low-(decadal) and high-frequency (daily) timescales. Dataset development focuses on surface temperature data, so includes continued updating and improvement of the global temperature record, as well as analyses of a recently developed dataset of daily temperature and precipitation dataset for Europe. The latter will be assessed in conjunction with a daily dataset of mean-sea-level pressure data, looking at changes in circulation types (whether changes in storm tracks and blocking have occurred) and whether the response of surface temperature and precipitation to the circulation patterns might also have changed. Phil Jones (PI),
David Lister
05/07 – 04/09
Global scale impacts of climate change: a multi-sectoral analysis

ClimGen website

This consortium project, led by Nigel Arnell at the University of Reading and funded by NERC as part of their QUEST programme, is quantitatively assessing the implications of climate change for a wide range of ecosystem services (including water resources, agricultural production, fisheries, flooding and disease). It will consider different rates and degrees of climate change, and thus will provide a framework for assessing the impacts of specific climate policies. The CRU contribution to this project is the provision of consistent climate change scenario data to all impact sectors, via the ClimGen software tool. Tim Osborn,
Ian Harris
05/07 – 09/09
Identification of changing precipitation extremes & attributions to atmospheric, oceanic and climatic changes This project, funded by NERC as part of their FREE programme, is diagnosing recent variations in the occurrence of extremely high precipitation events in the UK and investigating possible causes such as changes in atmospheric circulation, humidity and stability, and long-term climate change. Tim Osborn (PI),
Nathan Gillett,
Douglas Maraun
02/07 – 05/09
Process-based methods in the interpretation of tree-growth / climate relationships details to be added Keith Briffa 05/07 – 04/10
Qualitative applications of high resolution late Holocene proxy datasets: estimating climate sensitivity and thermohaline circulation influences This project, funded by NERC as part of their RAPID climate change programme, is considering the potential of high-resolution palaeoclimate records (such as tree rings) for estimating past changes in the Atlantic thermohaline circulation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, and for constraining estimates of the sensitivity of the climate system to external forcing. Keith Briffa (PI),
Phil Jones,
Tim Osborn, Gerard van der Schrier, Tom Melvin
07/03 – 06/08
Southern hemisphere climate change in an era of ozone recovery Over the past thirty years ozone depletion and greenhouse gas increases have led to a strengthening of the westerly winds blowing around the Southern Ocean, and this change in the circulation of the atmosphere has had many important effects, including a cooling over most of Antarctica, and a warming of the Antarctic Peninsula. Greenhouse gas levels are very likely to continue to increase over the next fifty years, but the future evolution of ozone, the dominant driver of the circulation trends, is much less certain. We plan to use state-of-the-art climate model, developed at the Met Office, to derive a range of predictions of future climate change which take account of our uncertainty in future ozone change. Nathan Gillett 03/07 – 02/10
To what extent was the Little Ice Age a result of a change in the thermohaline circulation? This project, funded by NERC as part of their RAPID climate change programme, is using the Met Office´s Unified Model of the climate system to consider whether some combination of radiative forcing (lower greenhouse gas concentrations, stronger volcanic forcing, weaker solar irradiance), weaker Atlantic thermohaline circulation and heat transport, and/or weaker North Atlantic Oscillation conditions is able to generate a climate similar to that experienced during the Little Ice Age in the 17th to 19th centuries. Tim Osborn (PI),
Keith Briffa,
Thomas Kleinen
08/05 – 07/08