Climate models produce projections of changes in climate from the present day, but these projections have a range, or spread. A simple measure of the confidence in a forecast would be the signal-to-noise ratio, r, of the size of the projected change to the spread around that change. An important question is ‘when does the spread in the forecasts become so large that the forecast should not be used’? Continue reading When to use uncertain climate forecasts
Category Archives: projections
Communicating climate variability
Update 10/03/11 – Accepted article also online. Comments very welcome.
Communicating the differences and links between climate variability and climate change is of growing importance, and I am currently writing an article for “Weather” on this. Continue reading Communicating climate variability
Consensus in precipitation projections
In the AR4, the IPCC presented this figure showing the consensus in precipitation projections for the 21st century, designed to be of use to planning for adaptation and mitigation. The coloured regions show where changes are likely to occur. My interest is in the white areas where models cannot agree on the sign of the change. This could mean that half the models predict a large drying and half predict a large increase in rainfall. But, it could also just mean that the changes are small, but that the sign is uncertain. Continue reading Consensus in precipitation projections