Project description
Making multi-decadal climate change predictions
Climate change is all around us – from longer periods of drought to an increase in the number of tropical storms, and from the loss of sea ice to more intense heat waves. Scientists predict global climate is projected to change over this century, but there is a need for improved information about the extent of the change beyond the next few decades. The EU-funded CONSTRAIN project aims to fill climate science and related policy-making knowledge gaps through a better understanding of how natural and human factors affect multi-decadal regional climate change. It will help scientists make climate projections for the next 20-50 years. The project’s findings will benefit the EU’s adaptation and mitigation strategy.
Objective
CONSTRAIN will focus research on three climate science knowledge gaps and a policy-facing knowledge gap that can be resolved over the next 4-5 years to significantly improve our understanding of how natural and human factors affect multi-decadal regional climate change. This will cement EU science as the world-leader in understanding climate sensitivity and climate variability, deliver significantly improved capability to make climate projections for the next 20-50 years, and provide up-to-date scientific evidence for international climate policy in two phases: Phase 1 will deliver a timely characterisation of physical science uncertainty and how it affects projections and committed levels of warming to the 2021 IPCC sixth assessment report; Phase 2 will deliver constrained surface temperature projections for the 2023 UNFCCC Global Stocktake. CONSTRAIN will take full advantage of climate model integrations from the sixth Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) and will leverage existing H2020 and ERC projects. Novel CMIP6 analyses will be combined with dedicated high resolution simulations and new observations to address identified knowledge gaps on radiative forcing, cloud feedbacks and the relationship between ocean variability and atmospheric change. A fourth identified knowledge gap is the effective translation of new physical science understanding into an improved evidence base for policy decisions. CONSTRAIN will address this by developing climate model emulators that integrate and operationalise learning from across the consortium to provide new capability to assess impacts of climate change under a broad range of emission scenarios. We will focus on the expected spatially resolved decadal changes until mid-century providing robust evidence on climate sensitivity, and regional temperature, precipitation and circulation changes, thereby enabling evidence-based policy decisions that will directly benefit the EU's adaptation and mitigation strategy.
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Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
LS2 9JT Leeds
United Kingdom