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Modelling past climates
28 October 2020
Chris leads international working group preparing for next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Dr Chris Brierley has devoted much of his research over the past year to an international effort modelling past climates.
The Palaeoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project (PMIP) has involved over 50 international research groups employing a newly developed Earth System model. This simulates the climates of the mid-Pliocene warm period, the last interglacial and glacial maximum and the post-glacial mid-Holocene period.
Chris is one of the leaders of PMIP’s working group devoted to past2future inference and climate variability.
In May 2019 UCL Geography hosted an international workshop to develop an action plan to prepare papers for the forthcoming 6th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
He has also led the effort to analyse the mid-Holocene experiment on the climate 6,000 years ago. A paper describing the results of this analysis was published in the online journal, Climate of the Past, in late September.
The same journal also published a paper on palaeoclimate simulations of El Niño, led by Dr Jo Brown from Melbourne, based on the UCL Geography analysis.
On 26-30th October an international meeting of the whole palaeoclimate modelling community was held in Nanjing, China, and online. UCL Geography was well represented, with Chris chairing the final session and giving various presentations remotely, while PhD student Anni Zhao even managed to attend the meeting in person.