General enquiries on this form should be made to:Defra, Science Directorate, Management Support and Finance Team,Telephone No. 020 7238 1612E-mail: research.competitions@defra.gsi.gov.uk

SID 5 Research Project Final Report

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NoteIn line with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, Defra aims to place the results of its completed research projects in the public domain wherever possible. The SID 5 (Research Project Final Report) is designed to capture the information on the results and outputs of Defra-funded research in a format that is easily publishable through the Defra website. A SID 5 must be completed for all projects.

This form is in Word format and the boxes may be expanded or reduced, as appropriate.

ACCESS TO INFORMATIONThe information collected on this form will be stored electronically and may be sent to any part of Defra, or to individual researchers or organisations outside Defra for the purposes of reviewing the project. Defra may also disclose the information to any outside organisation acting as an agent authorised by Defra to process final research reports on its behalf. Defra intends to publish this form on its website, unless there are strong reasons not to, which fully comply with exemptions under the Environmental Information Regulations or the Freedom of Information Act 2000.Defra may be required to release information, including personal data and commercial information, on request under the Environmental Information Regulations or the Freedom of Information Act 2000. However, Defra will not permit any unwarranted breach of confidentiality or act in contravention of its obligations under the Data Protection Act 1998. Defra or its appointed agents may use the name, address or other details on your form to contact you in connection with occasional customer research aimed at improving the processes through which Defra works with its contractors.

Project identification

1. Defra Project code PECD 6/12/37 GASRF 21

2. Project title

Climate Prediction Programme

3. Contractororganisation(s)

Met Office Hadley CentreFitzRoy RdExeterDevonEX1 3PB     

54. Total Defra project costs £ 145,760,582(agreed fixed price)

5. Project: start date................ 01 April 1990

end date................. 31 March 2007

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6. It is Defra’s intention to publish this form. Please confirm your agreement to do so...................................................................................YES NO (a) When preparing SID 5s contractors should bear in mind that Defra intends that they be made public. They

should be written in a clear and concise manner and represent a full account of the research project which someone not closely associated with the project can follow.Defra recognises that in a small minority of cases there may be information, such as intellectual property or commercially confidential data, used in or generated by the research project, which should not be disclosed. In these cases, such information should be detailed in a separate annex (not to be published) so that the SID 5 can be placed in the public domain. Where it is impossible to complete the Final Report without including references to any sensitive or confidential data, the information should be included and section (b) completed. NB: only in exceptional circumstances will Defra expect contractors to give a "No" answer.In all cases, reasons for withholding information must be fully in line with exemptions under the Environmental Information Regulations or the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

(b) If you have answered NO, please explain why the Final report should not be released into public domain

Executive Summary7. The executive summary must not exceed 2 sides in total of A4 and should be understandable to the

intelligent non-scientist. It should cover the main objectives, methods and findings of the research, together with any other significant events and options for new work.

1. Aim of the CPP

The main aim of the Climate Prediction Programme (CPP) was to deliver to Defra (and other bodies as determined by Defra) a wide range of scientific results, analyses, information, data and advice which was required to inform government policy in the areas of climate change mitigation (through the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the UK Climate Change Programme) and adaptation (through the UK Climate Impacts Programme).

2. Objectives

In order to fulfil the main aim, the CPP had a number of scientific objectives as follows:

1. to contribute to the understanding of components of the earth's climate system and development and validation of models which represent them2. to utilise these models to give the best possible predictions of changes to climate globally and in the UK, together with an estimate of their probability3. to use the climate model to simulate climate variability and change over the past 100 years4. to monitor climate on a global and national scale, using in-situ and space-based methods, and analyse these observations 5. to attribute recent trends in climate to specific causes, natural and Man-made6. to disseminate information to government, business and industry, media, pressure groups and others, and in particular to contribute substantially to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments. 7. to act as a focus for other climate change research undertaken in the UK

3. Methods

To achieve these objectives, the Met Office Hadley Centre was and continues to be maintained as a world-leading institution, equipped with world-leading climate models. The climate model is the backbone of most of the work at the Met Office Hadley Centre, and hence it is crucial that it be as advanced as any model in the world. Because the magnitude of climate change is determined by the cumulative effects of a large number of feedbacks between components of the climate system, then the model has to include representations of all these components so that the interactions can occur as they do in the real world.

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4. Findings

A discussion of the results and their reliability was assessed in detail by the series of independent reviews every 5 years and the annual reviews by the SRG. For example the independent review in published in 2007 concluded that:

The Met Office Hadley Centre holds a unique position in the world of climate science. No other single body has a comparable breadth of climate-change science and modelling, or has made the same contribution to global climate science and current knowledge.

Recent examples are highlighted by the Met Office Hadley Centre contributions to the IPCC 4th Assessment Report (AR4):We provided 8 lead authors, 1 convening lead author, 2 review editors and numerous contributing authors. Key Met Office Hadley Centre results included:1. New observational analyses, including global and regional surface temperature trends and their uncertainties, extremes, and temperature trends in the free troposphere;2. detection and attribution of climate change on all continents (except Antarctica) and in other aspects of climate change, including ocean warming, sea ice, temperature extremes and wind patterns; 3. probabilistic estimates of climate change based on quantification of model uncertainty; 4. observationally based estimates of climate sensitivity, which contributed to the new assessment of its range of uncertainty;5. new calculations of the impact of aerosols on radiative forcing; 6. contributions of ice sheets to sea level change and vulnerability of the Greenland ice sheet to global warming (including the threshold of 1.9-4.6°C mentioned in the SPM); 7. dominance of changes in surface heat fluxes in weakening the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.

5. Significant Events

The Met Office Hadley Centre has made significant contributions to all IPCC reports supplying more convening lead authors and lead authors than any other organisation over the years and making a considerable contribution to the content of the reports. The first IPCC assessment in 1990 led to the signing of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Rio in 1992, and the second assessment in 1995 was instrumental in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

The Met Office Hadley Centre supports Defra’s activities on the Subsidiary Body on Science and Technology (SBSTA), and also at the Conferences of Parties (COPs), by maintaining a presence at all the CoPs (except for the special CoP6.5), by staffing a stand, holding a special event (usually chaired by ministers, e.g. Margaret Beckett in CoP11 in Montreal 2005), and publishing a general report, all aimed at describing recent advances in the science of climate. Some work is targeted specifically at issues raised at SBSTA, e.g. work to assess the impact on climate change of the Brazilian proposal to cut emissions.

In February 2005 the Met Office Hadley Centre hosted a science meeting on ‘Avoiding dangerous climate change’ to kick off the focus on climate change for the UK’s G8 and EU presidency

Output from the Met Office Hadley Centre was delivered to other bodies in addition to Defra. The LINK project makes model data available to the research community, UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP) makes climate change scenarios available and the Met Office website makes observational data available and has details of publications and other information related to climate change.

Other direct contributions that affected government policy include:1. 1. Work done on the carbon cycle was used to advise of both the lack of permanence of sinks and the

potential for new boreal forests to accelerate climate change rather than reduce it. 2. 2. Work on aerosols and chemistry enabled advice to be given on the relative roles of CO2 and other

contributors such as methane and soot.3. 3. New work on stabilisation and overshoot of greenhouse gas targets was done during the last year and

has been submitted for publication. The results showed that without very large and immediate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions then the probability of exceeding a 2ºC warming target will be high.

4. 4. The report on the Economics of Climate Change published by Sir Nicholas Stern published in November 2006 relied heavily on the quantified probabilistic estimates of future climate change carried out in the Met Office Hadley Centre. Sir Nicholas’s team used these results to feed into their economics models to produce a quantified risk based assessment of the costs of mitigation, impacts and adaptation in both the developed and developing world.

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5.6. Options for new work

Defra has recognised the value of the work funded under the CPP contract and has just agreed a 5 year fixed price contract for an Integrated Climate Programme jointly funded with MoD to deliver policy relevant science as follows.

Met Office will support Defra in leading efforts to tackle climate change at a UK, European and International level to build an international consensus on the need for and shape of further action post 2012. In order to do this the Met Office will undertake world-leading research into climate change and variability on behalf of Defra, as part of a wholly integrated (joint) programme of climate research in the Met Office Hadley Centre, partly funded also by MoD (Defence Climate Research Programme – DCRP). The Met Office will focus on research that contributes to UK government policy objectives and will communicate the results to government and the public. This will be done through leadership of the UK climate community, collaboration with UK and world-wide institutions and internal customer-focussed links within the Met Office.

The primary outputs of the Integrated Climate Research Programme of the Met Office for Defra and MoD are: World-class research into climate change and variability which contributes to UK government policy objectives The communication of science and evidence of change and impacts:o to Defra for policy formulation and delivery;o to the widest possible stakeholder community, including media and the general public, in the UK, Europe and world-wide. The provision of ad hoc advice to the funding departments and for UK government generally.

Enhanced funding would significantly improve the quality of advice that could be given. The independent review of the Met Office Hadley Centre in 2007 concluded that:“the available supercomputing power limits both… science development and the application of this science to answer policy questions”.

Ways of addressing this are being explored with Defra.

Project Report to Defra8. As a guide this report should be no longer than 20 sides of A4. This report is to provide Defra with

details of the outputs of the research project for internal purposes; to meet the terms of the contract; and to allow Defra to publish details of the outputs to meet Environmental Information Regulation or Freedom of Information obligations. This short report to Defra does not preclude contractors from also seeking to publish a full, formal scientific report/paper in an appropriate scientific or other journal/publication. Indeed, Defra actively encourages such publications as part of the contract terms. The report to Defra should include: the scientific objectives as set out in the contract; the extent to which the objectives set out in the contract have been met; details of methods used and the results obtained, including statistical analysis (if appropriate); a discussion of the results and their reliability; the main implications of the findings; possible future work; and any action resulting from the research (e.g. IP, Knowledge Transfer).

1. The Scientific Objectives as set out in the contract

1.1 Background

Increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases originating from human activity are expected to change the Earth's climate significantly over the course of the century. Following the scientific debate initiated in the mid-1980s, the first policy commitment by a UK government minister was given in a statement by the Environment Minister, Lord Caithness, to the Toronto Conference on Climate Change and Sustainable Development in 1988. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established by World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in late 1988, the government

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took on responsibility for Working Group I covering the science of climate change. The Department of Environment judged that climate change was set to become a major policy area and hence decided to expand its climate change research programme. In 1989 it asked the Met Office to establish a research centre dedicated to climate change (the Met Office Hadley Centre) and carry out the Climate Prediction Programme, building on the existing Climate Research Programme (CRP), funded by the Ministry of Defence over the previous 15 years.

The Climate Prediction Programme was a 17 year contract (renewed annually with new research deliverables as a 3 year rolling contract) which provided a programme of research into climate change, relevant to the formulation of government policy. In later years it was funded and managed by the Global Atmosphere Division (GA, now Climate Energy: Science and Analysis, CESA) of the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and undertaken under contract by the Met office Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, a division of the Met Office. Underpinning work on climate research, and in particular on model development and climate monitoring continued to be supported by MoD.

1.2 Aim of the CPP

The main aim of the CPP was to deliver to Defra (and other bodies as determined by Defra) a wide range of scientific results, analyses, information, data and advice which was required to inform government policy in the areas of climate change mitigation (through the UNFCCC, and the UK Climate Change Programme) and adaptation (through the UKCIP).

1.3 Objectives

In order to fulfil the main aim, the CPP had a number of scientific objectives as follows:

1. to contribute to the understanding of components of the earth's climate system and development and validation of models which represent them

2. to utilise these models to give the best possible predictions of changes to climate globally and in the UK, together with an estimate of their probability

3. to use the climate model to simulate climate variability and change over the past 100 years4. to monitor climate on a global and national scale, using in-situ and space-based methods, and analyse

these observations 5. to attribute recent trends in climate to specific causes, natural and Man-made6. to disseminate information to government, business and industry, media, pressure groups and others,

and in particular to contribute substantially to IPCC assessments. 7. to act as a focus for other climate change research undertaken in the UK

To achieve these objectives, the Met Office Hadley Centre was and continues to be maintained as a world-leading institution, equipped with world-leading climate models.

1.4 Organisation of the CPP scientific programme

The CPP extended over a wide area of research, and was broken into a number (by the end of the contract 16) of technical annexes, each of which had an Annex Manager and covered an area of scientific speciality, as follows:

Annex 1 Predictions of global change, including sea-levelAnnex 2 Predictions of regional changeAnnex 3 Monitoring and analysis of climate change using in-situ dataAnnex 4 Monitoring of climate change using AATSR dataAnnex 5 Detection and attribution of climate changeAnnex 6 Medium-term predictions of climateAnnex 7 Clouds and radiationAnnex 8 Integrated land and ocean carbon cycleAnnex 9 Modelling of the oceanAnnex 10 Modelling of aerosols and atmospheric chemistryAnnex 11 Programme management, coordination and disseminationAnnex 12 Provision of computing supportAnnex 13 Physical, chemical and biological effects of climate changeAnnex 14 Probability, uncertainty and risk in climate predictionsAnnex 15 Changes in flooding and climate extremesAnnex 16 Climate modelling on the Earth Simulator supercomputer

2. The extent to which the objectives set out in the contract have been met

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The work undertaken in the 17 year contract was reviewed annually by the Met office Hadley Centre Scientific Review Group which was appointed by Defra and MoD. These reviews are available internally within CESA. In addition a much more detailed review of the Met office Hadley Centre was undertaken by a number of different independent consultants every 5 years or so, chosen by open competition by Defra and MoD. These reviews were published by Defra. The reviews confirmed that the objectives have been met. In particular the last review published in May 2007 concluded that“It is beyond dispute that the Met Office Hadley Centre occupies a position at the pinnacle of world climate science, and in translating that science into policy advice.”

3. Details of the methods used and the results obtained, including statistical analysis (if appropriate)

3.1 Introduction

The strategy of the CPP was determined by developments in science and by evolution of the requirement from Defra. Both of these changed over time, and hence the CPP had to be flexible enough to take the opportunities provided by the first, and meet the new demands of the second. For example, with the final agreement on the Kyoto Protocol reached in CoP7, attention in future CoP will turn increasingly to the need for further reductions in emissions, including non-Annex 1 countries, and ultimately a stabilisation of concentrations. Hence work in the CPP was initiated to support these aims. The content of the CPP was reviewed each year when the contract was varied, but was also subject to change in-year when a new line of work was required to support advice to policymakers.

The Hadley Centre has a dual strategy of developing both world-class climate models and observational data. This has yielded significant benefits by allowing a strong and iterative interplay between observational and modelling research. Similarly, our expertise in both natural climate variability and anthropogenic change allows each to be considered carefully when analysing the observational record.

The figure above shows how the Annexes concerned with development of process models (e.g. carbon cycle, aerosols) contributed to the coupled climate model, and also shows examples of how they provided policy-relevant outputs directly.

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The figure above shows the pathway from model development to the high level deliverables, and thence to policy.

3.2 Model development

The climate model is the backbone of most of the work at the Met Office Hadley Centre, and hence it is crucial that it be as advanced as any model in the world. Because the magnitude of climate change is determined by the cumulative effects of a large number of feedbacks between components of the climate system, then the model has to include representations of all these components so that the interactions can occur as they do in the real world.

The climate model is a variation of the Met Offices Unified Model (UM) which is used on daily for weather forecasting. It contains the same representation of dynamics (the circulation of the atmosphere) and parametrisation of physical processes (e.g. convection, boundary layer, radiation, transport) and hence the basic model and its upgrades are made freely available. The climate model adds to the UM processes which are not important for weather forecasting but which are for climate prediction, e.g. oceans, carbon cycle, chemistry, aerosols, and hence these are specifically developed at the Met Office Hadley Centre under the Defra and MoD contracts.

A climate model (HadCM1) which coupled the atmosphere and the ocean, and can thus predict the transient nature of climate change, was developed at the Met Office Hadley Centre in 1990 (the first outside the US). Later versions, HadCM2 and HadCM3, made successive improvements in quality (e.g. resolution, physics) and functionality (e.g. sulphur cycle). HadCM3, in particular, was the first to obviate the need for artificial flux-adjustments to prevent the model from drifting away from a realistic climate simulation. The next generation model is now complete, known as the first Met Office Hadley Global Environmental Model, HadGEM1. It uses a completely new scheme for representing the dynamics of the atmosphere, which has been used successfully by other branches of the Met Office to improve its weather forecasting skill. The Defra CPP is using this model for projections to submit to IPCC and is actively involved in evaluating this model in relation to other models. An improved version of this model is currently being finalised. In particular HadGEM1a has improved tropical sea surface temperatures, ENSO and a reduced warm bias over land.

Met Office Hadley Centre Global Climate Models

HadCM2 HadCM3 HadGEM1, 1a*

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Atmospheric resolution 2.5 x 3.75 2.5 x 3.75 1.25 x 1.875

Atmospheric levels 19 19 38Ocean resolution 2.5 x 3.75 1.25 x

1.251 x 1;

0.3 x 0.3 (equator)Ocean levels 20 20 40

Dynamics Eulerian Eulerian Semi-LagrangianFlux adjusted? yes no no

Interactive Sulphur cycle? no no yesCarbon cycle? no no yes

3.3 Statistical Analysis

Statistical methods are widely used in the analysis of observed and simulated aspects of climate variability and change, in order to provide policy-relevant climate advice for Defra. Standard methods (e.g. analysis of variance, regression analysis, t-tests, eigenvector analysis) are widely used to assess signals found in model simulations of the responses to greenhouse gas forcing or historical variations in sea surface temperature. Analysis of observations typically requires optimum interpolation, averaging and smoothing, including reduced space methods and other methods of estimating data uncertainties. The analysis of observed climate includes maximum covariance and cluster analysis, and while seasonal forecasting includes probability forecasts based on linear discriminant analysis.

Sophisticated spatiotemporal optimal fingerprinting techniques are used to establish the detection of historical climate change, and the level of attribution to human activity. Extreme event analysis involves application of tools such as generalised extreme value and Pareto distributions in order to identify robust observed and predicted changes from limited data samples. Production of probabilistic climate predictions for risk assessment involves the application of cutting-edge techniques in Bayesian inference, including elements such as Latin Hypercube design, emulation, importance sampling and singular value decomposition to estimate efficiently the effects of uncertainty.

3.4 Supercomputing

Because the earth's climate is complex, models which represent it or aspects of it are very large and require massive supercomputing power to run on. Hence a substantial proportion of the CPP was devoted to meeting this demand through a dedicated allocation of the Met Office's supercomputing capacity, currently an NEC SX-6 and SX-8 supercomputer procured in 2003 and upgraded January 2005 and September 2006. The ESYS 10-year review stated that "The Hadley Centre gains significant benefit from sharing computing resources with the rest of the Met Office" and "The Met Office supercomputing service still looks the best way of acquiring Hadley Centre supercomputing services for the foreseeable future". These findings were confirmed by the latest review in 2007. They also found that “The Met Office supercomputing service delivers good value for money to the Hadley Centre” and that “The Hadley Centre should continue to meet its supercomputing needs through the Met Office”.

3.5 Gearing of the Defra Climate Prediction Programme

The CPP was established by DoE at the Met Office in 1990 because an existing programme of climate change research had already been underway there for many years, and because other activities provided a substantial amount of gearing to the CPP. The same gearing still obtains today, and further contracts have added to this. The two most relevant contracts which provide direct gearing are Met Office Core funding (CORE, £80M pa) and Government Meteorological Research (GMR, £3.5M pa). CORE (more recently known as the National Meteorological Programme, NMP and the the Public Weather Service, PWS) is the main contract to the Met Office to maintain the capability expected of the state weather service (for example, the short range weather forecast), funded by a Core Customer Group of government departments and Agencies (including Defra). GMR, which is funded by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) on behalf of government as a whole, to provide the underlying capacity on which to quickly spin-up directed research programmes for specific products, for example Foot & Mouth predictions, dispersion of Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear material in theatres of conflict, nuclear accidents, etc.

The underlying GMR programme funded by MoD, and the Defra programme itself, have been instrumental in attracting funding from other parties which have, again, provided extra gearing. The main additional funding comes from a number of EC projects. The Met Office Hadley Centre has some 10 of these currently; in some cases this provides enough funding to cover a post for 2 years, in others it may only be a few £K for workshops. In many cases the contracts are entered into for their scientific benefit, bringing as they do substantial collaboration with other EU institutes, rather than the additional funding.

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A good example of synergy between funding agencies lies in the area of regional climate modelling (RCM). In the past, this has been entirely funded from the CPP, but in 2000 Department For International Development (DFID) awarded a contract for development of the model to be used in developing countries, UN Development Programme (UNDP) a small contract for training these countries. Both of these have now ended, but in 2003, the Foreighn and Commonwealth Office (FCO) agreed to fund a post for training for Proving Regional Climates for Impacts Studies (PRECIS) for 2 years. This funding finished in 2007, and this work will be scaled down in future if funding is not available. In addition the EC have funded a large programme (PRUDENCE) for Regional Climate Model exchanges, intercomparisons and analysis.

The CPP programme was also geared by collaboration with a wide range of outside institutions, in particular Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) institutes and universities and international organisations, in Europe to develop a joint ocean model and in Australia to enhance the Unified Model (the basis for the climate model).

4. A discussion of the results and their reliability

A discussion of the results and their reliability was assessed in detail by the series of independent reviews every 5 years and the annual reviews by the Met Office Hadley Centre Science Review Group (SRG). For example the independent review in 2007 concluded that:

“The Met Office Hadley Centre holds a unique position in the world of climate science. No other single body has a comparable breadth of climate-change science and modelling, or has made the same contribution to global climate science and current knowledge.”

The quality of the research and advice provided by the Met Office Hadley Centre is maintained in a number of established ways, as indicated below.

Research is submitted for publication in good peer-reviewed scientific journals. A list of publications is reported annually.

The work of the Met Office Hadley Centre is reviewed by its SRG, owned jointly by Defra and MoD. This has recently been reconstituted with international members; its fifth meeting was held in May 2007

The Met Office Hadley Centre is subjected to a more intensive review every 5 years, carried out by independent consultants and involving international scientists. The most recent was undertaken in 2007, covering science, interactions, communication, user satisfaction, computing and reviewing. Its conclusions and recommendations can be found at

http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climatechange/research/hadley/index.htm The Met Office was awarded Investors in People status in 2000, and ISO9000 in 2002.

5. The main implications of the findings

5.1 Alignment of the Climate Prediction Programme with Defra’s business and science objectives

The Climate Prediction Programme was not an academic research programme; its work plan and deliverables was driven by Defra’s requirements for science to inform UK government policy on climate change mitigation and adaptation. As the policy requirements changed, so did the research programme objectives. In this section we show how the work described in the CPP Annexes contributed to one or more of the science and business objectives and issues, as published in the Global Atmosphere section of the current strategy for the Climate, Energy and Environmental Risk (CEER) Directorate for 2003-2006. The full strategy can be seen at www.defra.gov.uk/science/s_is/directorates/asp.

We list first a summary of objectives in the strategy relevant to the Met Office Hadley CPP, then show which of these were contributed to by the CPP Annexes.

Objectives of GA Business Area 1: International negotiations on climate change Objective CC1: Negotiate new commitments under the UNFCCC for the 2nd Commitment Period, beginning by 2005, and including consideration of objectives on stabilisation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and greater participation of major developing country emitters

Objective CC2: Work in conjunction with others to re-engage the US fully in international action to tackle climate change.

Objective CC7: Contribute effective science to the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the IPCC by 2006.

Research requirements to meet objectives CC1 and CC2:

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CC1/2RR1: Improvements in prediction modelsCC1/2RR2: Better observation of the climate systemCC1/2RR3: Improved quantification of climate system processesCC1/2RR4: Detailed study of feedback processesCC1/2RR5: Potential for climate system surprisesCC1/2RR6: Tackle the question of stabilisation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the emission pathways to achieve such stabilisation

Objective CC6: Anticipate future climate change by planning cost effective adaptation strategies for the UK

Research requirements to meet CC6:CC6RR1: Development of the knowledge base of on climate projectionsCC6RR2: Assess likely impacts of extreme events in the UKCC6RR3: Identify dangerous levels of climate changeCC6RR4: Assess emissions pathways needed to achieve different levels of stabilization

GA Science objectives and target outcomes:

Key Scientific Issues over next 5-10 years:KS1: reduce uncertainty in climate predictionsKS2: assess real eventsKS3: secondary greenhouse gases and other radiatively active major componentsKS4: stability of the ocean circulation and ice sheetsKS5: critical feedback mechanisms such as clouds and water vapor and the carbon cycle

SO1: Assess global and regional impacts and risks associated with various greenhouse gas stabilization levels and pathwaysSO3: Quantify and reduce uncertainties in the influence of human activities on past climate and the prediction of climate change, including reduced uncertainty in the sensitivity of the greenhouse system to greenhouse gases and other influencesSO4: develop a finer resolution limited area model to improve regional climate predictions for impact and adaptation studiesSO9: Undertake detailed assessment of the potential effect of climate change on extreme weather events and their impacts

Contribution to objectives by CPP Annexes:

Annex 1: Global predictions of climate change and sea-level riseContributes to CC7, CC1/2RR1, CC1/2RR5, CC1/2RR6, CC6RR3, KS4, SO1Annex 2: Predictions of regional climate changeContributes to CC7, CC1/2RR1, SO1, SO4Annex 3: Monitoring and analysis of climate change Contributes to CC7, CC1/2RR1, CC6RR2, KS2Annex 4: SST and cloud properties from AATSRContributes to CC7, CC1/2RR1, CC1/2RR2, CC1/2RR3Annex 5: Detection and attribution of climate changeContributes to CC7, KS2, SO3Annex 6: Medium-term climate predictionsContributes to CC7, CC6RR1, CC1/2RR1Annex 7: Clouds, water vapour and radiationContributes to CC7, CC1/2RR1, CC1/2RR2, CC1/2RR3, CC1/2RR4, KS5Annex 8: Global carbon cycle and ecosystemsContributes to CC7, CC1/2RR1, CC1/2RR3, CC1/2RR4, CC1/2RR5, CC1/2RR6, CC6RR3, CC6RR4, KS5Annex 9: Ocean modelling Contributes to CC7, CC1/2RR1, CC1/2RR2, CC1/2RR3, CC6RR3, KS4Annex 10: Atmospheric chemistry and aerosolsContributes to CC7, CC1/2RR1, CC1/2RR2, CC1/2RR4, CC1/2RR5, CC6RR4, KS3, KS5Annex 11: Programme management, coordination and disseminationContributes to CC1, CC6Annex 12: IT infrastructureThis annex has no direct output to policy, but provides the essential IT support to enable all other annexes to deliver such output.Annex 13: Effects of climate changeContributes to CC7, CC1/2RR1, CC1/2RR5, CC6RR3, SO1Annex 14: Probability, uncertainty and risk

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Contributes to CC7, KS1, CC1/2RR1Annex 15: Change in flooding and climate extremesContributes to CC7, CC6RR2, KS2, SO9Annex 16: Climate modeling on the Earth Simulator computer Contributes to CC7, CC1/2RR1, CC1/2RR3, CC1/2RR5, KS4, KS5, SO3

The Met Office Hadley Centre made important contributions to scientific understanding and predictions of climate change, and to the Defra policy objectives outlined above. It also made important direct contributions to other aspects of climate change that affect government policy.

5.2 Important contributions to Scientific Understanding

A general history of the Met Office Hadley Centre published in December covered the period of the CPP contract and gives the historical context and importance of the contract is given in a paper in Weatherhttp://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/113510898/PDFSTART

Recent examples of significant scientific contributions are highlighted by the Met Office Hadley Centre contributions to the IPCC AR4:We provided 8 lead authors, 1 convening lead author, 2 review editors and numerous contributing authors. Key Met Office Hadley Centre results included:1. New observational analyses, including global and regional surface temperature trends and their uncertainties, extremes, and temperature trends in the free troposphere.2. Detection and attribution of climate change on all continents (except Antarctica) and in other aspects of climate change, including ocean warming, sea ice, temperature extremes and wind patterns.3. Probabilistic estimates of climate change based on quantification of model uncertainty. 4. Observationally based estimates of climate sensitivity, which contributed to the new assessment of its range of uncertainty.5. New calculations of the impact of aerosols on radiative forcing. 6. Contributions of ice sheets to sea level change and vulnerability of the Greenland ice sheet to global warming (including the threshold of 1.9-4.6°C mentioned in the Summary for Policy Makers).7. Dominance of changes in surface heat fluxes in weakening the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.

5.3 Direct contributions that affected government policy

Examples include:1. Work done on the carbon cycle was used to advise of both the lack of permanence of sinks and the potential for

new boreal forests to accelerate climate change rather than reduce it. 2. Work on aerosols and chemistry enabled advice to be given on the relative roles of CO2 and other contributors

such as methane and soot.3. New work on stabilisation and overshoot of greenhouse gas targets was done during the last year and has been

submitted for publication. The results showed that without very large and immediate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions then the probability of exceeding a 2ºC warming target will be high.

4. The report on the Economics of Climate Change published by Sir Nicholas Stern published in November 2006 relied heavily on the quantified probabilistic estimates of future climate change carried out in the Met Office Hadley Centre. Sir Nicholas’s team used these results to feed into their economics models to produce a quantified risk based assessment of the costs of mitigation, impacts and adaptation in both the developed and developing world.

6. Possible future work

6.1 Agreed future work

Defra has recognised the value of the work funded under the CPP contract and has just agreed a 5 year fixed price contract for an Integrated Climate Programme jointly funded with MoD to deliver policy relevant science as follows.

Met Office will support Defra in leading efforts to tackle climate change at a UK, European and International level to build an international consensus on the need for and shape of further action post 2012. In order to do this the Met Office will undertake world-leading research into climate change and variability on behalf of Defra, as part of a wholly integrated (joint) programme of climate research in the Met Office Hadley Centre, partly funded also by MoD (Defence Climate Research Programme – DCRP). The Met Office will focus on research that contributes to UK government policy objectives and will communicate the results to government and the public. This will be done through leadership of the UK climate community, collaboration with UK and world-wide institutions and internal customer-focussed links within the Met Office.

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The primary outputs of the Integrated Climate Research Programme of the Met Office for Defra and MoD are: World-class research into climate change and variability which contributes to UK government policy objectives The communication of science and evidence of change and impacts:o to Defra for policy formulation and delivery;o to the widest possible stakeholder community, including media and the general public, in the UK, Europe and world-wide. The provision of ad hoc advice to the funding departments and for UK government generally.

The programme will deliver to Defra, MoD, other UK Government Departments and other stakeholders (at the discretion of Defra and MoD) policy relevant science research outputs, matching Defra and MoD policy outputs, which are specifically;for Defra and MoD:Evidence Basis - Scientific assessment and understanding of climate change, weather and climate events and processes;For defra:Mitigation - Evidence to enhance UK Government input to deliver international mitigation policy, on:o Avoiding dangerous climate change,o Negotiations for mitigation options;Adaptation and planning - Evidence to enhance UK Government input to deliver climate change adaptation strategies in the context of sustainable development, both:o internationally, and o nationally;Specifically for MoD, but also relevant to Defra:Adaptation and planning - Evidence relevant to future security as global, regional and national climate changes occur, especially on a time scale of seasons to decades (up to 30 years ahead);Evidence relevant to adaptation to unavoidable climate change and concomitant impacts, botho internationally, and o in the UK;

The relevant science will be delivered through 5 overarching science outputs:E - Evidence Basis - Scientific assessment and understanding of climate change, weather and climate events and processes;Q - Quantify and reduce uncertainty in projections of climate change.1

D – Dangerous climate change – define and assess the risksM – Mitigation – Scientific assessment of the effect of mitigation options on climate change and its impactsA – Adaptation and Planning – Scientific information required to assess adaptation options

In addition a number of specific products and high level advice will be delivered through:P - Climate Products C - Communication Products

6.2 A possible extension to this workEnhanced funding would significantly improve the quality of advice that could be given. The independent review of the Met Office Hadley Centre in 2007 concluded that:“the available supercomputing power limits both… science development and the application of this science to answer policy questions”.

Ways of addressing this are being explored with Defra.

7. Any action resulting from the research (e.g. IP, knowledge transfer)

7.1 Support to Defra in IPCC, SBSTA and CoPs

The CPP supported DEFRA in relation to the two scientific bodies advising the Framework Convention, IPCC and the Subsidiary Body on Science and Technology (SBSTA), and also at the Conferences of Parties (COPs). The first IPCC assessment in 1990 led to the signing of the UNFCCC in Rio in 1992, and the second assessment in 1995 was instrumental in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The Met Office Hadley Centre hosted the Technical Support Group to Working Group I (Science, chaired by Sir John Houghton) and more recently to Working Group II (Impacts, chaired by Martin Parry) of IPCC since its inception, under a separate contract from Defra. As part of CPP, Defra have demanded that Met Office Hadley Centre scientists make the maximum contribution to IPCC 1 This underpins all other outputs, but is included as an output of the programme because of its importance.

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WGI, both in terms of scientific information and also leadership of the report. To that end, in the IPCC 2001 report 3 of the 21 Convening Lead Authors and 5 of the Lead Authors were from the Met Office Hadley Centre. In the Summary for Policymakers, 3 of the 6 diagrams used show or include Met Office Hadley Centre results. CLAs and Las for the Fourth Assessment Report (4AR) 1 CLA, 7 Las and 1 review editor were from the Met Office Hadley Centre.

The CPP also supported Defra’s work in SBSTA through work on the Brazilian Proposal, which proposes differentiated emission reduction targets for Parties according to the impact of their historic emissions on temperature rise. The Met Office Hadley Centre has maintained a presence at all the CoPs (except for the special CoP6.5), by staffing a stand, holding a special event (usually chaired by ministers, eg Margaret Beckett in CoP11 in Montreal 2005), and publishing a general report, all aimed at describing recent advances in the science of climate. In February 2005 the Met Office Hadley Centre hosted a science meeting on ‘Avoiding dangerous climate change’ to kick off the focus on climate change for the UK’s G8 and EU presidency

7.2 Outputs to other bodies

Output from the Met Office Hadley Centre was delivered to other bodies in addition to Defra. The most significant of these are described in this section, but in addition there are a host of ad-hoc requests and enquiries from a wide variety of sources which are met during each year.

The results from the Met Office Hadley Centre's climate change experiments are made freely available to the international community for research purposes. This is activity is undertaken through the Climate Impacts LINK Project, a separate DEFRA funded programme. The Climate Impacts LINK Project is currently based at the British Atmospheric Data Centre(BADC). Data are processed and archived at BADC, whilst technical and scientific support is provided by the Met Office Hadley Centre. Data are available from the BADC via ftp and an on-line web interface (see http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/data/link/ for details). There are (at the time of writing) 40 active registered users of the BADC LINK archive. This programme has been hugely successful; The Climate Impacts LINK Project has been operational since 1991 and has supplied the results of the Met Office Hadley Centre's experiments to many researchers in the international climate change research community. The majority of climate change and impacts assessments performed to date and reported in the scientific media have used the results from the Met Office Hadley Centre provided by the Climate Impacts LINK Project. Data from the Met Office Hadley Centre's climate change experiments can also be found at the IPCC's Data Distribution Centre (see http://www.ipcc-data.org/ for details).

Predictions from specific Met Office Hadley Centre experiments are used as scenarios of climate change in the UKCIP (see http://www.ukcip.org.uk/ for details). This was first done in 1997/8 using existing model data; UKCIP98 data has been requested by some 136 organisations. In April 2002 The Secretary of State for Defra launched the new UKCIP02 scenarios, which were predictions from experiments specifically designed using the regional climate model. An extension of this effort at a 25km resolution, so as to include islands, was carried out in 2002 for the British Irish Council, and the scenarios report published in 2003. New simulations for the next set of scenarios (UKCIPnext, to appear in 2008) are underway based on user requirements as determined by meetings organised by UKCIP.

7.3 Media dissemination

The Climate Prediction Programme at the Met Office Hadley Centre now also includes an Information Officer. The ESYS review estimated that in the period 1995-2000, Met office Hadley Centre staff made over 200 media appearances. These included multiple appearances in key programmes such as the ITN, BBC1, and Radio 4 evening news, TV breakfast programmes, Today, Tonight and Panorama, as well as numerous documentaries, CNN, BBC World TV and World Service radio and many newspaper articles. Media interest has increased in the last few years.

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References to published material9. This section should be used to record links (hypertext links where possible) or references to other

published material generated by, or relating to this project.General information about the Met Office Hadley Centre is available fromhttp://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/index.html

The Met Office Hadley Centre has published around 1600 refereed scientific papers during the period of the contract and a list of these is available onhttp://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/pubs/ref_pubs/

Brochures about Met Office Hadley Centre work are available fromhttp://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/pubs/brochures/

A general history of the Met Office Hadley Centre published in December 2006 which covers the period of the CPP contract and gives the historical context and importance of the contract is given in a paper in Weatherhttp://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/113510898/PDFSTART

Climate model scenarios and data from the project is available from LINK http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/data/link/IPCC http://www.ipcc-data.org/UKCIP http://www.ukcip.org.uk/

Observations datasets are available fromhttp://hadobs.metoffice.com/

The latest independent review of the Hadley Centre produced by Risk Solutions in May 2007 is available on the Defra websitehttp://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climatechange/research/pdf/hadleycentrereview0507.pdf

The associated review of supercomputing is available at http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climatechange/research/pdf/hadleysupercompute0507.pdf

Previous reports were published by Defra (but don’t appear to be available on their website)

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