Mathematics Department & GSI Joint Seminar - Gavin Schmidt 'The Future of Climate Modelling'

Abstract:

Observations over past decades, and current monitoring of the climate, show unequivocally that the Earth’s climate is changing and that the impacts of that change are being felt in myriad ways – from more intense heatwaves, accelerating sea level rise, increasing rainfall intensity, wildfires, and ice loss. The principal lens that scientists use to understand these changes, and to make predictions of future change, are climate models. These numerical simulations of the physics, chemistry and (increasingly) the biology of the climate system have a 40-year track record of successful predictions. However, while their complexity has grown and their skill has improved over the decades, they remain incomplete and insufficiently detailed. Meanwhile, the questions that are being posed by decision makers and the general public are challenging both the theoretical basis of the models, their capacity to deliver answers, and the infrastructure that the scientific community has built around them. To be frank, we are being asked questions about climate change in real time that we cannot answer. I will discuss where we find ourselves in 2024 where climate records are being broken on a sometimes daily basis, but where the opportunities to rethink what we are doing have never been greater. Does the future lie in ultra-high resolution, or machine learning, or greater complexity, or more operational stances, or a combination of all of these approaches? How will this be managed and who will make these decisions? I hope this lecture will provide some necessary background for this continuing conversation.

Biography:

Gavin A. Schmidt is a British climatologist, climate modeler and Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, and co-founder of the climate science blog RealClimate.

He was educated at The Corsham School, earned a BA (Hons) in mathematics at Jesus College, Oxford, and a PhD in applied mathematics at University College London. Schmidt worked on the variability of the ocean circulation and climate, using general circulation models (GCMs). He has also worked on ways to reconcile paleo-data with models. He helped develop the GISS ocean and coupled GCMs to improve the representation of the present day climate, while investigating their response to climate forcing.

As of 2024, Schmidt heads NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He was named for the director position in June 2014 as its then deputy director, becoming to the third person to hold this post, which had been vacant after the retirement of James E. Hansen. In an interview with Science News, Schmidt said that he wanted to continue the institute's work on climate modeling and to expand its work on climate impacts and astrobiology.

His main research interest is climate variability, both its internal and the response to climate forcing, investigated via ocean-atmosphere general circulation models. He also uses these to study palaeoclimate by working on methods to compare palaeo-data with model output. Schmidt helps to develop the GISS ocean and coupled GCMs (ModelE). This model has been "isotopically enabled" to carry oxygen-18 tracers, allowing the model to simulate the pattern of δ18O observed in ice cores, cave records and ocean sediments.