Group
Members
"The present is the key to the past"
Uniformitarianism; James Hutton
..can the past also be the key to the future?
James Pope (Ph.D. Student)
Plio-QUMP - Quantifying Uncertainty in Pliocene Model Predictions
The analogous relationship between the Pliocene and the possible effects of anthropogenic climate change have been studied with increasing intensity in recent years. This research comes from a two pronged strategy with data coming from multi-proxy sources (i.e. PRISM) and from climate models. The combination of the two enables predictions to be made about the change to global climate and the impacts upon the land surface due to global warming.
However, uncertainties reside in the proxy data sets and as a result this feeds into the model data. Likewise, climate models have uncertainties within them that arise from different perturbations available for the physics of different systems especially in the atmosphere and ocean/atmosphere interactions.
The aim of the Plio-QUMP project is to quantify these uncertainties, and begin to produce initially error bars related to climate model perturbations. In time this will be expanded to include the proxy data from the PRISM datasets. Finally, once the uncertainties have begun to be quantified, the final stage of the project will be to use the results to produce some regional climate predictions based on Pliocene data of North America, North Atlantic, Europe and Africas.
The project will be principally supervised by Dr Alan Haywood (University of Leeds) with support from Dr Dan Lunt (University of Bristol), Harry Dowsett (United States Geological Survey) and Matthew Collins (UK Met Office). The project is supported by a NERC PhD Studentship and a CASE award from the USGS.
email: eejop@leeds.ac.uk
web: http://homepages.see.leeds.ac.uk/~eejop/
