Recent research on aerosol-cloud interactions from volcanic eruptions will reduce uncertainty in climate model projections. An international team of climate scientists, including SMURPHS partners Reading and Leeds, studied the effects that the 2014-15 eruption at Holuhraun in Iceland had on cloud formations in the surrounding region, using this prolonged event to study how tiny aerosol particles...
In May 2017 we held the second, annual, project-wide research meeting. This two-day gathering of SMURPHS teams was held at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton and was attended by researchers from all 9 partner institutions. The event was kicked-off with a keynote presentation by SMURPHS Adviser Professor Matthew England, Deputy Director of Climate Change...
Global surface warming was slower than expected in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Might this have been due to ocean or atmosphere fluctuations as research suggests, or was it in fact due to something more subtle? In his 'News and Views' article in Nature Climate Change Principal Investigator (Reading), Richard Allan comments that, ' the...
The ocean plays a crucial role in the global energy budget as it is Earth's primary heat reservoir on climate-relevant time scales. As such, variations in ocean heat content play a fundamental role in global and regional climate variability and the transient response to climate. In addition, ocean heat uptake is one of the major...
Defining 'pre-industrial' The UN Paris Agreement on climate change aims to ensure increases in global temperature are less than 2°C above ‘pre-industrial’ levels, with an aspirational 1.5°C limit. However, the ‘starting line’ of the pre-industrial era is not defined by the UN agreements, or by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). A new analysis...
New, detailed, radiative transfer calculations of greenhouse gas radiative forcing have been performed by Gunnar Myhre (a SMURPHS External Partner at the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research – Oslo) in collaboration with the University of Reading (a member of the SMURPHS consortium). They show that the radiative forcing due to methane changes are...
Can the so-called hiatus be described as an unlikely rogue event? Recent research by SMURPHS teams at National Oceanography Centre (NOC) and University of Southampton has analysed surface air temperature from 20 climate models to estimate the historical and future likelihood of hiatuses and “surges”, and has shown that the global hiatus of the early...
The extensive discussion of the nature, causes and even the very existence of the slowdown in the rate of global warming between the late 1990s and around 2010 has, surprisingly, paid little attention to the role of greenhouse gases (GHGs), the principal component of human-induced climate change. The results from a new study conducted by...
In this latest study published in Nature Climate Change an international team of researchers, including SMURPHS Investigators Keith Shine and Piers Forster, considered how the choice of metric can affect the relative emphasis placed on reductions of ‘cumulative climate pollutants’ such as carbon dioxide versus ‘short-lived climate pollutants’ (SLCPs), including methane and black carbon. The research showed...
Editor of the Climate Lab Book and SMURPHS Investigator, Ed Hawkins has created an animated infographic showing how global temperatures have increased from 1850 to the present day. This very powerful and effective visualization of global warming has attracted a global audience, not least on Twitter where it has gone viral. It has also been picked up by the wider media. In his...
