Climate

Earth Observation for climate diagnosis and prediction

Theme Leaders

	Professor Keith Haynes University of Reading
	Dr Chris Taylor Centre for Ecology and Hydrology

Partners and Customers

Our goal is to exploit EO to improve our national capability for climate prediction over timescales from months to decades.

We are using Earth Observation (EO) data to improve our understanding and prediction of climate change. T do this, we are involved in the creation of good quality data for monitoring and diagnosis, and work closely with other NCEO theme practitioners to integrate EO with other global atmospheric, oceanic and climatic data sets.

Our research priorities are:

• To compare what we know of the radiation budget, water vapour and clouds in climate prediction models with observations we can get from satellite instruments like the Geostationary Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (GERB) and Cloudsat. Understanding the hydrological cycle, and how these feedbacks work is a major challenge.
• To use new space measurements of the oceans with measurements from ships and buoys and reanalyse ocean climate data to look at variability over tens of years and identify climate change fingerprints.
• To use measurements from Cryosat2 of sea-ice thickness to evaluate climate prediction models of the atmosphere-ocean-cryosphere system in the Arctic.

Our current work includes:

• Intercomparisons between HIRS radiances from the HadIR project and equivalent simulations from Hadley Centre model.
• Processing CloudSat-CALIPSO data with variational ice cloud retrieval and evaluation with the Met Office and ECMWF
• Development of new cloud simulator code (COSP) for running with HiGEM output ready for CFMIP (Cloud Feedback Model Intercomparison Project) runs.
• Baseline ocean reanalyses at 1 and ¼ resolution complete up to 2007
• Development of a new ocean reanalysis based on ERA-Interim forcing
• Development of a defined set of Arctic diagnostics, including ice, for comparison and assessment with IPY (International Polar Year) observations and first assessments of modelling 2007 ice minimum
• Analysis of satellite based air-sea flux products
• Setting up a UK GOCE working group to exploit data post launch
• Improved estimation of the size of ocean dynamic effects in geodetic fingerprint determination of the causes of sea level change.
• Testing melt pond physics in sea ice-ocean modelling
• Installation and testing of coupled versions of Hadley Centre models (FAMOUS and HadCM3) with ice sheet model (GLIMMER), including extensions to include exchange of ocean variables
• Quantification of time and space scales of land surface response to precipitation in semi-arid Africa"