To develop moethodologies for incorporating plausible future volcanic erruptions into CMIP climate projections.
Despite the important role volcanic emissions play in shaping the climate, they have been omitted or at best crudely represented in state-of-the-art future climate projections to date. Recent work by our team at BCCR has assessed the effect of including volcanoes in
Developing a synthesis paper on Eruasian cooling and Arctic to mid-latitude teleconnections.
The recent severe winters experienced over the Eurasian continent have attracted much attention, in particular because of an observed association with sea ice cover in the Barents- Kara Sea. This topic is particularly challenging to study because the relationship between sea ice and Eurasian winters manifests differently in reanalysis data compared to climate models (see selected Bjerknes publications below).
To provide policy-relevant information through improved projections of climate hazards and extremes, by integrating long-term time series from proxy records with numerical model output and Earth observation data.
Climate hazards is a theme of growing importance, and it draws interest not only from the science community but also from policy-makers, industrial and financial actors, and local governments. We propose to bring together the BCCR’s expertise on climate-related geohazards, sea-level change, and extreme weather events, to conduct innovative research. We envision this synergetic project as an important conduit for the new BCCR Research Theme on climate hazards.
Improving understanding of circulation biases in climate models and linking these to downstream extreme events.
The projected response of the atmospheric circulation to radiative changes driven by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations is currently highly uncertain (Shepherd, 2014; Bony et al., 2015a; Ceppi and Shepherd, 2017). One of the primary reasons for this uncertainty is that the state-of-the- art models we employ to investigate these responses struggle to represent important features of the midlatitude circulation such as: storm tracks, jets and blocking.
Improving the representation of small-scale nonlinear ocean-atmosphere interactions in Climate Models by innovative joint observing and modelling approaches.
EUREC4A-OA will implement ad-hoc innovative observations and a hierarchy of numerical simulations focusing on mesoscale and submesoscale ocean dynamics and the atmospheric boundary layer at scales ranging from 20 m to 1000 km over the northwest tropical North Atlantic. The aim is to advance our knowledge of the phenomenology and representation of air-sea interactions, physical and biogeochemical ocean small-scale non-linear processes in ESMs but also in NWPs, S2Ss and decadal forecasts operational systems.
Stephen Outten and a colleague from NORCE recently published a study onextreme winds over Europe for the remainder of this century, affecting more business sectors than you would think.
The KeyCLIM project set out to better understand, calculate and reduce the uncertainty related to climate change in Northern Latitudes, especially in the Arctic. The project group has assembled new model scenarios and data documenting large and partly irreversible climate changes in the north for the next 50-300 years.
The projected enhanced warming of the northern latitudes in the forthcoming decades will impact the region’s hydrological cycle, the cryosphere and biogeochemical cycles, impacts which are associated with forecasted, significant changes of the Earth System functioning. It is not clear how the northern world will look like with a summer ice-free Arctic Ocean, changed atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns and the many specific responses of the Northern Earth system.
Arctic cyclones can break up and reshape the Arctic sea-ice cover and can be expected to do so more readily as the ice grows thinner due to anthropogenic climate change. Processes driven by Arctic cyclones can enhance the rate of melting of the ice and increase its export out of the Arctic. We hypothesise that surface coupling (interactions between the ocean, sea ice and atmosphere) play a crucial role in determining the life cycle of Arctic cyclones, and the effect they have on the sea ice.
Arctic cyclones can break up and reshape the Arctic sea-ice cover and can be expected to do so more readily as the ice grows thinner due to anthropogenic climate change. Processes driven by Arctic cyclones can enhance the rate of melting of the ice and increase its export out of the Arctic. The record minima in sea ice extent in 2012, which was partially attributed to the presence of an Arctic cyclone. However, despite their importance, Arctic cyclones have remained relatively un-examined.
