Climate Feedback

Olive Heffernan

“Imagine farmers being able to determine what to plant and where based on drought forecasts three to five years out”, said Jane Lubchenco, head of NOAA, in Geneva last month.

Speaking to delegates at the World Climate Conference, Lubchenco was lending her voice to the vision of climate services, which would deliver climate predictions as reliable and useable as weather forecasts, and tailored to meet the needs of specific end-users. Underlying the vision of climate services is the assumption that further research will result in reliable climate predictions indispensable to adaptation planners.

In July, Germany opened a centre in Hamburg to provide the nation with such services. The Waxman-Markey Bill, passed by the US House of Representatives in June, would launch a similar service within the US, and headed by NOAA, to develop and distribute climate information and predictions to decision-makers.

But in a new Commentary on Nature Reports Climate Change, Mike Hulme and co-authors urge caution in relying on climate predictions to aid adaptation. They write:

Scientists and decision-makers should treat climate models not as truth machines, but instead as one of a range of tools to explore future possibilities.

They highlight that unlike weather forecasts - whose value in informing decision-making can routinely be tested over time by comparison with observed weather patterns - the skill of climate predictions is unknown, especially at the decade-to-century timescale.

Hulme and co-authors illustrate the perils of relying on the predict-then-adapt mode of planning with an example from the Australian state of Victoria. In this case, predictions from a 2005 study of the water supply to Melbourne assured decision-makers that existing plans provided a sufficient buffer against projected climate change up to 2020. But by 2006, water supply levels had dropped far below that predicted even for the most severe climate change scenario (see figure below).

Continue reading "Climate Prediction: keeping it in perspective " »

Posted by Olive Heffernan on October 29, 2009
Categories: Climate prediction, Communicating Climate Change, Olive Heffernan, Opinion, WCC-3 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Heads of state agreed yesterday in Geneva to establish a global framework to deliver climate services to society. “We agreed on the need for climate services across all nations”, says Martin Visbeck, chair of the committee of scientific experts to the World Climate Conference.

The global framework will oversee the supply of demand-driven climate data to end-users such as farmers to water-resource managers, with the ultimate aim of aiding adaptation to climate change. Climate services would particularly help developing nations, for example, many of which lack access to the weather and climate observations needed to plan their global-warming adaptation strategies.

But the implementation of such services will face several political and scientific hurdles. Over the next four months, an independent task force set up by World Meteorological Organization, which convened the conference, will work out how to make this vision a reality. An arduous 12-month consultation process with signatory nations will then follow.

I’ve reported this for Nature News in full here. The news story covers the scientific challenges ahead in moving from climate ‘projections’ to decadal scale ‘predictions’, and also looks at the issue of data sharing, which will be require some careful negotiating over the coming months.

Ultimately, delegates expressed optimism about the vision agreed in Geneva this week, but there are concerns about how tough its implementation will be. According to Visbeck, the deal was much stronger on Tuesday, but “an unfortunate negotiation” meant that a couple of keys aspects were changed late in the day. One crucial change is that WMO is now ‘convening’ the implementation strategy rather than leading on it. Lacking one organization at the helm, the process of decision making could become that much harder. Secondly, a clause was added that says to all UN member states can weigh on each stage of the implementation plan before the final report is delivered to WMO in January 2011. “We didn’t achieve the maximum achievable”, says Visbeck.

In the meantime, however nations are charging ahead with implementing serivice-oriented climate science on their own steam. In July, Germany opened a national climate services centre in Hamburg, and the US is currently discussing plans for a national climate service in Congress and among relevant agencies.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on September 04, 2009
Categories: 3a66c47d615e63162dcac400812ffa53, Climate prediction, Data, Olive Heffernan, WCC-3 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Following the recent discussion here on access to climate data, it’s been interesting to see the theme emerge in Geneva this week at the third World Climate Conference.

Almost 2,000 climatologists, weather forecasters and policy makers have come together to discuss the need to develop climate services that will enable adaptation to climate change. Better predictions of the changes to come will form the basis of such services. But in order to predict climate change more accurately and over smaller areas and time periods, investments in observations, research and computing will be necessary.

Delegates here are hoping that governments will commit to investing in these areas, but some say it’s also crucial that observational and modelled data become available to others. “It’s absolutely crucial. The societal importance far outweighs any commercial benefit”, says Ralph Rayner, chair of the scientific committee of the Global Ocean Observing System, an international effort to monitor marine variables. José Achache, director of the Group on Earth Observations, agrees. “We need more observations. Commerce and security are limiting the availability of some necessary and useful climate data”, says Achache.

That’s a bit of a thorny topic here, because some Met services package proprietary data and sell it to users. But it’s also a complex issue, says Vicky Pope of the UK Met Office, which operates as a trading fund. She says that a lot of data are made freely available by Met services, but that detailed climate data has commercial value. Pope also points out that nothing is ever free. "The tax payer is actually paying, and one of the reasons we charge users is so that the taxpayer doesn't pay too much".

Speaking at the conference on Monday, Jean-Jacques Dordain, director general of the European Space Agency, promoted sharing of climate data. “We are sharing our data. We are providing our data to African nations and are cooperating with other nations”

There have been vast improvements in data sharing in recent years, says Achache, but he warns that there is the risk of moving backward in certain areas. For example, some nations are calling for restrictions on data collected from ARGO oceanographic data buoys when they drift inside a country’s Exclusive Economic Zone, he says.

Kuniyoshi Takeuchi, director of the International Center for Water Hazards and Risk Management in Japan says that lack of access to climate data other than by climate professionals in rich nations is a problem. “Local ownership of climate information is needed for human empowerment” says Takeuchi.

Climatologist Jerry Meehl of the National Centre for Atmopsheric Researc in Boulder, Colorado says “it would make things a lot easier” if climate data were openly available to all, though he says that scientists probably should be allowed a grace period in which they have exclusive access to the results.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on September 02, 2009
Categories: Data, Olive Heffernan, WCC-3 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Climate scientists, weather forecasters and policy makers are gathered in Geneva this week to discuss the need for reliable climate predictions to help society adapt to climate change.

The third World Climate Conference of the World Meteorological Organization, which runs from 31 August to 4 September 2009, aims to produce a new global framework for delivering climate information to end users.

Scientists at the conference are hopeful that with sustained support for climate research and improved computing capabilities they could reliably predict climate impacts at much higher resolution – perhaps down to several tens of kilometres over the coming decades. The ultimate goal , and one that was voiced at last year’s World Climate Modelling Summit in Reading (which we covered here) is to produce climate predictions that are as reliable and useable as weather forecasts.

That would be a vast improvement on the projections available from today’s global climate models. Most of these enable estimates of how temperature, and other climate variables such as rainfall, will change over areas of several hundred kilometres up until the end of the century and beyond.

While a large focus of the conference is on improving climate modelling in order to make reliable predictions, delegates in Geneva are also discussing the need to tailor information to the needs of specific end-users.

“A forecast in not enough; our challenge is to communicate what we know that the future in a manner that can allow people to make decisions”, said Gro Harlem Brundtland, special envoy of the UN secretary-general on climate change, at the opening session on Monday. At the end of the 5-day conference, delegates will issue a declaration of their intent to establish a new global framework to meet this challenge.

But major advances will be needed in the science of prediction before climate information is of real service to society. “In 10-15 years we may have climate forecasts like we now have weather forecasts”, said Guy Brasseur of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado to delegates here on Monday. “We have the international vision, expertise and scientific commitment to deliver climate services”, said Brasseur, but he also warned of the difficulties in developing climate models of sufficiently high spatial resolution and reliability.

One hurdle is the massive investment needed to fund one or more supercomputers; others include accessing data and sustaining long-term observations. Despite these, several attempts to improve predictive capability are underway worldwide. One of these, being championed by Tim Palmer of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts is the concept of ‘seamless prediction’, in which one modelling system is used to predict atmospheric conditions on time scales varying from hours to decades. Other efforts, being headed by scientists from the UK Met Office and elsewhere, are focused on how climate change will pan out in the coming decades, and combines aspects of seasonal forecasting with centennial prediction (which I won’t go into now, but hope to come back to). Still another approach is Earth System Modelling, which attempts to model the whole earth system – including feedbacks - more comprehensively than climate models, at spatial scales of 150km across.

Scientists at the conference are excited at the possibility that such efforts will lead to greater predictability, but are also concerned that end-users could have unrealistic expectations of what that means. “We’ll never be able to produce absolute predictions of what will happen in the future”, says Vicky Pope of the UK Met office. She says that scientists must work within a risk management framework so that people don’t misuse the data. “We are nervous about the uncertainties and errors associated with the models we are using”, says Jerry Meehl of NCAR, adding “That needs to be part of the message that gets out with climate services”.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on September 01, 2009
Categories: Climate prediction, Communicating Climate Change, Olive Heffernan, Regional climate, WCC-3 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I’ll be heading to Geneva this coming Sunday to attend the World Meteorological Organisation’s third World Climate Conference. The conference, which runs from August 31 until September 4, takes climate prediction as its theme, and aims to establish an international framework to guide the development of climate services, linking climate predictions with climate-risk management and adaptation. This should an interesting opportunity to look in more depth at the issue of whether climate prediction is indeed scientifically feasible and if so, at what it will take to move from climate projections to predictions.

I’ll be blogging from the conference daily to Climate Feedback, and you can follow me on twitter@oliveh

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on August 28, 2009
Categories: Olive Heffernan, WCC-3 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)