Improving global climate modelling

To take effective policy action, decision-makers need reliable estimates about how the climate may change in the future. ESMs are the most reliable tools for estimating how the Earth’s climate will respond to future greenhouse gas emissions. These models require continuous testing and improvement to correct inaccuracies and incorporate new processes.

The EMBRACE (Earth system Model Bias Reduction and Assessing abrupt Climate changE) project has brought together the leading ESM researchers in Europe with the goal of improving the ability of European ESMs to accurately represent key Earth system processes and thereby make reliable projections of future climate change.

The project team is currently improving individual components of European ESMs such as monsoon dynamics, atmospheric convection and gravity waves, terrestrial and marine carbon cycle processes and the representation of cloud-aerosol interactions.

Project partners developed a set of diagnostic and performance measures for a community ESM evaluation tool (ESMvalTool) to determine the overall quality of the project’s ESM simulations. Finally, the project uses these ESMs to assess the risk of abrupt, potentially irreversible, changes in key components of the Earth system in response to future greenhouse gas, aerosol and land-use scenarios.

By improving the realism of European ESMs, EMBRACE provides policy and decision-makers with a more reliable picture of the future risks and opportunities associated with global change, supporting decision-making in areas such as climate change mitigation and impact-adaptation planning.