With manmade climate change now a well-established fact, the Met Office Hadley Centre has developed a new science programme focusing on improving our understanding of extreme weather events. Prof Stephen Belcher introduces this new programme, which will underpin the development of new climate services
Abstract
The first two challenges to climate science have been to establish whether or not the climate is warming and, if it is, to what extent the warming is due to emissions of greenhouse gases. The IPCC 5th Assessment Report of Working Group 1 (2013) established that “Changes in the atmosphere, cryosphere and ocean show unequivocally that the world is warming” and that “It is extremely likely (95% certainty) that human influence is responsible for more than half of the warming since 1950”. So the challenges for climate science move now to understanding past, present and future climate variability and change in order to help society and decision makers develop resilience to climate events, make wise adaptation decisions and developing carbon budgets to limit the damage of climate change: Climate science needs to move from the seminar room into actionable information for climate services.
In this talk Stephen Belcher will present the new science programme of the Met Office Hadley Centre, and its role in the broader UK and European context, with emphasis on how we are responding to these new challenges. There are two classes of event that demand attention: climate events, which are of regional scale and of seasonal duration, such as the European summer of 2003 or the UK winter storms of 2013/14, and of the character and frequency of high impact weather events, such as heavy rainfall events or high wind events. The goals are to develop observations of past events, to make statements about the role of anthropogenic climate change in increasing the probability of current events, and to develop understanding and prediction systems of future events, from a season ahead, 1-10 years ahead and decades ahead. This programme, we believe, forms the science required to develop climate services, such the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Biography
Stephen obtained a PhD in fluid dynamics from the University of Cambridge in 1990. Following work as a research fellow at Stanford and Cambridge Universities, he moved to the University of Reading in 1994, where he served as Head of the School of Mathematical and Physical Science between 2007 and 2010. In 2010 he became the Joint Met Office Chair in Weather Systems. This role gave him a taster of working closely with the Met Office, and in 2012 he was appointed Head of the Met Office Hadley Centre, where he provides leadership to 175 scientific staff and scientific direction for Climate Programme funded by DECC and Defra on behalf of UK Government.
Stephen has published more than 100 papers in atmospheric and oceanic turbulence, notably in the atmospheric and oceanic boundary layers that couple the atmosphere to the oceans, and in the role of cities in setting the local climate and air quality. Currently he leads the OSMOSIS and ClearFlo projects funded by NERC.
Stephen is a member of the NERC Strategy Board, the Joint Scientific Committee of the World Climate Research Programme and is a former Associate Editor of the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. In 2002, Stephen received the Rosenstiel Award for Oceanography for outstanding research in oceanographic science, and in 2011 he delivered the Scruton Lecture at the Institution of Civil Engineers.